Project Mailer - User contributions [en]

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-14T14:09:26Z

Maggiemrogers: /* Through the Lens of the Beatniks Remediation */ new section

{{Talk header}}
[[/Archive 202504/]]

== Final edits ==
Hello, my article is complete: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Ernest_and_Norman_(Exit_Music)|Ernest and Norman (Exit Music)]]
:{{Reply to|Flowersbloom}} great, thank you. I made some corrections. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, Dr. Lucas. Below is the link to my edited article:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:ASpeed/sandbox
:{{Reply to|ASpeed}} great. Let me know when it’s finished and posted, and I’l have a look. It appears as if you still have a bit of work to do. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. I have completed most of my Remediation Articles, but I still show issues for the one named, "[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman]].

Based on the latest updates, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Battles_for_Regard,_Writerly_and_Otherwise|Battles for Regard, Writerly and Otherwise]] looks good with exception of including a '''category'''.
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} this one is good. I made some corrections before removing the banner, mostly in your sources. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

May you let me know if there is anything I can do on my end to resolve the issues with the first [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|article]]?

[[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 21:47, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} looking very good, but some sources missing page numbers. Please see to those. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

:::Thank you @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] . I will review those and respond when complete. [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 22:47, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::::@[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. Thank you for your feedback. A review of article additions was made for source pages. [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 20:22, 11 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::{{Reply to| ALedezma}} ok, looking good. I made some corrections. There's one final thing to do: no footnotes should appear in the notes section; use {{tl|harvtxt}} instead; I did one to show you how to use the template. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:39, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::@[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] Changes were done to footnote sources. Thank you! [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 19:59, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I finished my remediation article https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer%27s_The_Fight:_Hemingway,_Bullfighting,_and_the_Lovely_Metaphysics_of_Boxing&action=edit [[User:TWietstruk|TWietstruk]] ([[User talk:TWietstruk|talk]]) 19:44, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TWietstruk}} good work so far, but there is more to do: placement of footnotes (eliminate spaces around them and punctuation always goes ''before'' the footnote.); proofread for typos; fix all red errors at the bottom (most of these are from errors in sourcing); works cited entries should be bulleted list and eliminate space between entries. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Final edit and no errors with some help from @NRMMGA5108, @JKilchenmann. Please mark me as complete. On to help someone else with the things I've learned
https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer%27s_The_Fight:_Hemingway,_Bullfighting,_and_the_Lovely_Metaphysics_of_Boxing&action=edit [[User:TWietstruk|TWietstruk]] ([[User talk:TWietstruk|talk]]) 17:52, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I have finished my assigned remediation article: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Jive-Ass_Aficionado:_Why_Are_We_in_Vietnam%3F_and_Hemingway%27s_Moral_Code#cite_note-FOOTNOTEHemingway2003-24
Username ADear.
:{{Reply to|ADear}} thank you. I have marked this as complete. Please be sure you sign your talk page posts correctly. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Erhernandez}} well done! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. I removed your banner after making a few corrections. Please have a look over it and move on to the next thing. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:06, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::@Grlucas, I have tried correcting the sfn codes in my citations. I was able to get the 2 web citations to link correctly. But for some reason, I cannot get the Mailer 1967 film Wild 90 citation to link to the reference list. Please advise. [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} OK, all fixed and published. Thanks. Please move on to another remediation. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:46, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe there have been some updates made to the project. I believe I have also updated the works cited section to show correct templates. Please let me know if there is anything further that I need to do. Thank you, Caitlin.
::{{reply to| CVinson}} please sign your talk page posts correctly. Thanks. You still need to do some work on the sources. Use the <code>|author-mask=1</code> in your template for repeated author names. Also, you must eliminate the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” message at the bottom. No spaces or returns before or after the {{tl|pg}} call, as I already mentioned above. No parenthetical citations should be left, either; those should all be remediated to footnotes. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:50, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I have updated the sources and updated the in-text citations. I am still having trouble with the "Harv and Sfn no-target errors." I have not been successful in fixing this error and have tried multiple ways to fix it. —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 8:18, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

::::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I see that I still have a red X for my remediation assignment. Is there something else I am still missing? —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::{{reply to| CVinson}} sorry, I'm just getting back to it. There are quite a few punctuation errors. Some left out and others appear after the {{tl|sfn}}. I'm trying to correct those I see, but you should have a look, too. Page is designated as <code>p=</code> in {{tl|sfn}}, not <code>pg=</code>; and a span of pages needs <code>pp=</code>. Again, I have tried to correct these. I removed the banner, but please have another look through. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:01, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} a stellar job. Well done. I removed the banner, so you can move on to another article. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:12, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} Well done! Banner removed, url added. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:18, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

==Oohh Normie Final Edits==
Hi Dr. Lucas, I have finished my article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/"Oohh_Normie_—_You're_Sooo_Hemingway":_Mailer_Memories_and_Encounters|Oohh Normie, You're Sooo Hemingway]]. Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. [[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 20:01, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Tbara4554}} thank you. I made some corrections and removed the banner. You might want to have another look over it. Please move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:53, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review. Thanks.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Harlot%27s_Ghost,_Bildungsroman,_Masculinity_and_Hemingway

[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 21:22, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} excellent. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:39, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== I am done with this ==

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Situating_Hemingway:_Mailer,_Style,_Ethics
:Received. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:29, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Review PM Article ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|here]] is my remediated article, ready for review![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 12:21, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} great work. I have removed the banner, so you are good to move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:20, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have finished my remedidation project and I am ready for it to be reviewed. '''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]

Thanks,

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 13:04, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work so far. Please remove wikilinks. Change ' and " to typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. And all red errors at the bottom of the page need to be taken care of. These are likely all from coding errors in your sources. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have removed the wikilinks, changed to the correct typographic style and updated my sources.
'''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe] Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:55, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

[I forgot to fill out the summary box. I am adding my summary]
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} you're getting there! It looks great. You must eliminate all the red errors at the bottom. These appear when there are errors in your citations. Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:15, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

@{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything I can think of and I still have harv and sfn no-target errors and harv and sfn multiple-target errors and cs1 uses editors parameter. Do I not include the editor? [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 16:03, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have managed to get rid of two of the red target errors. I am still working on finding the harv sfn multiple target error. Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 20:37, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything i can think of to remove the last red error flag. I had to turn it in. I don't know that else I can do in this situation. I was given citation that did not follow any of the given formats. [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:45, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} all parenthetical citations must be remediated to {{tl|sfn}}; none of yours are. Get these done, then we can worry about the errors. (Some notes on sources: any generic <code><nowiki>{{citation}}</nowiki></code> will not be correct. I see you have a book review by Marshall that has no source (I tried to find the original and cannot; this is a weird citation; I'll continue to look for it). There's also one that looks like a film that should use the [[w:Template:Cite AV media|<code>Cite AV media</code> template]].) Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:16, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Submission ==

Hello!
Here's my remediated article; [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Devil's_Party:_Reading_and_Wreaking_Vengeance_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest|The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in ''The Castle in the Forest'']].
Thanks! Please let me know if there's anything I can review or correct.
[[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 13:23, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} nice work! Banner removed, so please move on to something else in the volume. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Vol. 4: Rumors of Grace article remediated ==

I believe I have completed remediation of ''[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Rumors_of_Grace:_God-Language_in_Hemingway_and_Mailer|Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer]]'', vol. 4. I was having last-minute trouble with sfn errors for sources without authors, but Justin Kilchenmann helped me out, so I think they are fixed.
:{{Reply to|Sherrilledwards}} You have done a remarkable job—a real Herculean effort! Footnotes should not go in any notes. See those I changed; the others should be changed in the same way. I have done some, but the others have to be fixed, I'm afraid. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}}I believe I have completed these fixes, so the article is again ready for review. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 15:49, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to| Sherrilledwards}} truly exceptional work—a model remediation! Marked as complete. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:30, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Inside Norman Mailer ==

Hi Dr. Lucas - I have finished remediating the article, [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]]. Please let me know if I need to make any adjustments. Thank you! [[User:Chelsey.brantley|Chelsey.brantley]] ([[User talk:Chelsey.brantley|talk]]) 18:09, 7 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Chelsey.brantley}} good work! Please help with another article from volume 4. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:36, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed: Norman Mailer: Playboy Magazine ==

I hope I am doing this is right. I have finished remediating my article about Norman Mailer and its in my designated sandbox [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer:_Playboy_Magazine_Heavyweight here.]
If there are any last minute edits, let me know. I got the last of the errors removed yesterday. And I believe we are on the same page with leaving the in-line citations for ''Playboy'' to be as is, since the author didn't put them down in the works cited. [[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:14, 7 April 2025 (EDT)Nina Mizner
:{{Reply to|NrmMGA5108}} looking good! So, the parenthetical citations still in the article, I'm assuming, are there because of those missing sources? Please check your page numbers; some seem to be off. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:04, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I found the page number error and its corrected, and yes all the parenthetical citations should be referencing issues of the ''playboy'' magazine, which were not listed in the works cited. --[[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| NrmMGA5108}} it looks great. I removed the banner! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:29, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Remediation From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity? ==

Greeting Dr. Lucas,

I have made the adjustment that you mentioned.

I also made additional edits to my short footnotes and noticed that my citations did not link to my references - which has been fixed.

I have tested all of my citations, and they all work.

Here is my article by Alexander Hicks, ''From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity?''

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/From_Here_to_Eternity_and_The_Naked_and_the_Dead:_Premiere_to_Eternity%3F

Have a great day.
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} Please always sign your talk page posts. Several “quoted items” in the article appear as ‘quoted items’; these must be corrected, please. No spaces or returns should surround {{tl|pg}} calls. Multiple page numbers should look like this <code><nowiki>{{sfn|Moretti|1996|pp=11-14}}</nowiki></code>; note the double <code>pp</code>. There seem to be many typos. I corrected some for you, but you must see to the rest. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:16, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

Are these the only additional corrections that need to be made? This is different from what you mentioned before.

I just want to be sure that I have hit everything.

Also can you verify what other typos you are seeing, I have ran through this twice.

If something is spelt a certain way, for example "Soljer", I have left it that way. Since it is mentioned like that in the article.
—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 06:49, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

I have gone through and fixed all of the short footnotes.

I have gone line by line with a ruler to look at any typos, and fixed the words that I found that had a dash in them/needed to be lowercased.

I have also fixed the quotations.

—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 12:31, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} much better. Periods go inside quotations marks; I think I fixed these, but please check. Also, there are no spaces before footnotes; again, I did a find/replace, but you should check. Also, check that all titles of novels are italicized (if it's italicized in the PDF, then it has to be italicized in the remediation, including abbreviations, like ''Naked''); I fixed a couple. Also, no extra spaces; there should only be a single blank space between paragraphs. There are quite a few little details that needed (need?) fixing. I removed the banner, but please check my work. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 12:41, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon” ==

Greetings Dr. Lucus,

My article is ready for your review. Thank you.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer%E2%80%99s_%E2%80%9CFootnote_to_Death_in_the_Afternoon%E2%80%9D)
:{{Reply to| KForeman}} it's coming along. Please ''always'' sign your talk page posts. Right up top, there are errors. Please use the real {{tl|pg}}, like all the other articles. Citations need to be fixed. All parenthetical citations must be converted. You still have quite a bit of work to do. All red sections need to be seen to and corrected. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

=Remediation of "Cluster Seeds and the Mailer Legacy"=
Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have completed the remediation of [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Cluster_Seeds_and_the_Mailer_Legacy&oldid=18200| my article], and it is ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 11:32, 8 April 2025 (EDT)@ADavis
:{{Reply to| ADavis}} got it. I think I check it yesterday and removed the banner then. Please move on to another piece. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediating Article: Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing Volume 4. ==

Hello Dr. Lucas,

I have completed remediating my article. Here is the link [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|The Mailer Review: Volume 4: Mailer, Hemingway, Boxing (2010)]] [[User:JBrown|JBrown]] ([[User talk:JBrown|talk]]) 13:01, 8 April 2025 (EDT)JBrown
:{{Reply to|JBrown}} a good start, but all parenthetical citations need to be footnotes. Also, check your headers. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norris Church Mailer'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up remediating the article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norris Church Mailer|Norris Church Mailer]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 13:42, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Kamyers}} awesome work! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edits Completed and Ready for Review ==

Dr. Lucas, I have completed my assigned remediation article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Looking_at_the_Past:_Nostalgia_as_Technique_in_The_Naked_and_the_Dead_and_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls|Looking at the Past: Nostalgia as Technique in The Naked and the Dead and For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. Please review at your convenience. I enjoyed working on this assignment. I look forward to your suggestions and feedback. All the best, Danielle (DBond007)
:{{Reply to| DBond007}} ok, good work. Please remove all the external links. Links to Wikipedia are not necessary, but if used, they need to be done correctly. There should be no spaces before {{tl|sfn}}. May sure all your ' and " are actually typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. Remove any superfluous spaces and line breaks; these mess up the formatting. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Thank you. I will get started on these revisions immediately. Thanks for the feedback and your time. :)[[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 11:30, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}} I have completed all the requested revisions and ready for review round 2. Thank you again![[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 12:10, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to|DBond007}} looking better! There are still items to be seen to, like titles on novels and magazines need to appear like they do in the original: if it's italicized in the PDF, it must be italicized on the web. I added the epigram for you and corrected that pesky citation. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:41, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed the remediation assignment ==

Good evening Dr. Lucas,

I hope I am doing this right. Here is the link for my completed Remediation article: [http://The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Encounters_with_Mailer Encounters with Mailer].

I look forward to reading your feedback.

All the best,

Patrick Riley
:{{Reply to|Priley1984}} thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:40, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project Submission: An Expected Encounter in an Unexpected Place ==

Link:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_An_Expected_Encounter_in_an_Unexpected_Place

Winnie Verna
:{{Reply to|Wverna}} received, thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:51, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== E.Mosley ==

Good evening, @Grlucas. I have completed my Remediation Articles[[https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/On_Reading_Mailer_Too_Young]]. The article I had was " On Reading Mailer Too Young Volume 4, 2010
:{{Reply to| Essence903m}} thank you. I had to fix and clean-up quite a bit. Your saves also do not include summaries. When you move on to your next article, please be more careful and follow the instructions. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Kynndra Watson ==

Good Evening, @grlucas. i have completed my Remediation articles: Volume 5: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law and Volume 4: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer,_Hemingway,_and_the_%E2%80%9CReds%E2%80%9D.

Thank you.
:{{Reply to| KWatson}} thank you, and this is a good start, but there are still many items that need to be cleaned up, like footnote indications (They go after punctuation), citation errors (all the red errors at the bottom need to be seen to), extra spaces and ALL CAPS need to be removed. Please see other completed articles for models. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:18, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/What Would Be the Fun of That?|"What Would Be the Fun of That?"]] by Peter Alson.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:33, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} awesome! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:21, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “Remembering Norris Church” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris Church|“Remembering Norris Church”]] by John Bowers.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 16:17, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} and again, excellent! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:22, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “The Norris I Knew” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/The Norris I Knew|“The Norris I Knew”]] by Christopher Busa.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:04, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} rockin’! 👍🏼 —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:24, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Norris Mailer" Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Norris Mailer|"Norris Mailer"]] by Nancy Collins.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} thanks again. You’re tearing it up. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:32, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Rise Above It" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Rise Above It|"Rise Above It"]] by David Ebershoff—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 11:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} excellent. Many thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:15, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Additional Articles ==

Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have remediated [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/A_View_Through_the_Prism&oldid=18744|"A View Through the Prism"], [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/Lip_Liner|"Lip Liner"], and [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Living_Room_Show#|"The Living Room Show"] in Volume 5. They are ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 12:31, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|ADavis}} great work. Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:26, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Submission notification sent 29 March ==

@grlucas

Dr. Lucas - I sent a Talk Page notification that I had completed the page I remediated on 29 March. The table indicates I haven't done anything yet. I sent it from the Talk Page from the article site. I don't see a response from that notification, but I had received one from you earlier in the process.
I don't understand what happened.

[[User:LogansPop22|LogansPop22]] ([[User talk:LogansPop22|talk]]) 14:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|LogansPop22}} sorry if I missed that. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Hemingway and Women at the Front: Blowing Bridges in The Fifth Column, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Other Works|this article]], right? It's looking great, though all the parenthetical citations must be converted to footnotes using {{tl|sfn}} and some of the author names in your notes should use {{tl|harvtxt}}. I added the "citations" section for you. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law ==

@Grlucas, I have made some additional edits to this [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law article] in Volume 5 by correcting most of the citations. There are 2 that still do not work, but I think that is because the sources are incomplete.

[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 21:16, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TPoole}} Looking really good, and this is a complicated one. A couple of things: no spaces or line breaks before or after {{tl|pg}}; I removed the spaces before {{tl|sfn}}, but you might want to check them; there are some typos, like missing spaces before some parentheses; no footnotes should appear in the notes section: use {{tl|harvtxt}} instead. And all the red errors at the bottom need to be cleared up. Great work so far! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:00, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Red Error-Gone ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}I have deleted all the sfn's and the red error is gone. I don't know why I didn't think about this days ago.

[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe|Gladstein-Monroe]]

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 23:07, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|MerAtticus}} getting closer. A few things: you should use <code>|author-mask=1</code> for repeated author names in your works cited; all parenthetical citations need to be replaced with footnotes using {{tl|sfn}}; must punctuation in your sources need to be removed as the templates do that for you; and you need to use {{tl|harvtxt}} for citations in your endnotes. Also, letters and films have their own templates. I did a couple of these for you as examples. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:14, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Remembering Norris" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris|"Remembering Norris"]] by Margo Howard.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:20, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} excellent! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:35, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Norman Mailer: From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_From_Orgone_Accumulator_to_Cancer_Protection_for_Schizophrenics

I was unable to find the correct format for the first works cited entry under Mailer. It is a reprint of a magazine article. Thank you. [[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 16:28, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} you are a master remediator! Thank you for going above and beyond. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:44, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

==Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Trust & Sparring with Norman==
Dr. Lucas, these were some of the smaller ones, so I went ahead and knocked them out. They are ready for review: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Sparring with Norman|Sparring with Norman]], [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Trust|Trust]], and [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls|Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 10:27, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Kamyers}} all excellent—above and beyond! Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:56, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing'' ==

Hi everyone,
I am currently helping with the article, [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Death,_Art,_and_the_Disturbing:_Hemingway_and_Mailer_and_the_Art_of_Writing Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing]. It still has a good bit to go, if anyone wants to help out.
—[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 5:17 PM, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Mimi and Mercer ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have corrected the Mimi Gladstein [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Piling On: Norman Mailer’s Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]] and removed all the red errors. I also have finishe the Erin Mercer article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Automatons and the Atomic Abyss: The Naked and the Dead]], except the ''The Naked and the Dead'' in the display title. An error occured.
[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 19:26, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Through the Lens of the Beatniks Remediation ==

Hello, Dr. Lucas! I've completed the remediation of [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Through_the_Lens_of_the_Beatniks:_Norman_Mailer_and_Modern_American_Man’s_Quest_for_Self-Realization#CITEREFNaked1992|Through the Lens of the Beatniks]]. I wasn't able to get the letter citations exactly how I thought they should be. If there's anything I'm missing, please let me know! Thanks!

[[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 10:09, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Through the Lens of the Beatniks: Norman Mailer and Modern American Man’s Quest for Self-Realization

2025-04-14T13:59:17Z

Maggiemrogers: Corrected a citation error

{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Working}} 

{{Byline|last=Chandarlapaty|first=Raj|abstract=An analysis of the relationship, similarities, and cultural connections between Mailer and the major Beat writers. |note=My thanks to the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin for permission to examine the Norman Mailer archives in researching this essay.}}
{{dc|dc=F|ew mid-century writers were friendly}} with the Beat Generation. Most, including Norman Mailer, cited their criminal and licentious impulses as an undermining tangling of ethically strong American sensibilities. I have noted Mailer’s criticism found in “The White Negro,” where Mailer sketched the unkempt and ghettoized portrait of white rebels such as Neal Cassady. Whether it is Mailer, Arthur Miller, or left poet-rockers such as Bob Dylan, or even fiction writers such as Truman Capote, the recurring message of a degenerated gang of would-be hoodlums abandoning mainstream lifestyles remained a cynical counter-step to the endless innovations and cultural adventurism that was unheard of for most Americans in the 1950s.

I realized that I had visited the literary spectacle of Norman Mailer but a few times: once, as a child, when ''The Executioner’s Song'' aired on ABC in 1980, and then, in 2007 when Mailer died at the age of 84. While a graduate student, I thought that he was compared unfavorably to Capote, with Mailer a kind of “copier,” an imitator of Capote’s much more virtuous meditation on crime and human psychology. The essays were very much in Capote’s favor. While reading ''The Naked and the Dead'', I began to understand something wholly detached from the occult glory, fame, and entertainer-super- star-politician thread that Mailer is famous for colonizing: Mailer was definitely interested in narrating the cerebration of modern man’s social and civic problems, and perhaps the direct challenge to American humankind’s {{pg|231|232}}democratic spirit when faced with the powerful and nature-deciding apparatus of institutions and authoritarianism. He writes the following of “The League of Omnipotent Men”:
<blockquote>You could kill the dozen men, and there would be another dozen to replace them, and another and another. Out of all the vast pressures and crosscurrents of history was evolving the archetype of twentieth-century man. The ''particular'' man who would direct it, make certain that “the natural role ...was anxiety.” The techniques had outraced the psyche. “The majority of men must be subservient to the machine and it’s not a business they instinctively enjoy.” And in the marginal area, the gap, were the peculiar tensions that birthed the dream. {{sfn|Mailer|1948}}</blockquote>
As a whole, ''The Naked and the Dead'' snapshots very familiar wartime ground—the ethnic and racial jokes, the longing for sexuality and the thrust of jealousy, the protected incomprehension of foreign cultures that impaled American democracy with the very real contention that American mankind was simply not humanly prepared to lead the world at all. There is much more: first, this novel captures American manhood’s very real and gnawing psychic doubts and missteps, while dreamily transposing the economic and tactile miracle of long-standing American prosperity. Second, tactility is established in the above passage akin to the sentiments of Jack Kerouac—that in a modern world, we should lose our animate confidence, pride, and basically our intellectual ability to manage the fruit of both changing times and world responsibility. What I intend to depict in this essay, then, is Mailer’s increasing, if guarded, approval for some of the character and ethnographic foci of Beat writers. The letters and testimonies gathered from Harry Ransom Center overstate the anxiety, terror, and illuminating potential of the far-reaching hand of the new generation of literary bohemians, and therefore Mailer’s recognition that both democracy and culture would be in some way transformed by this shaded lens of cultural hereticism.

A remarkable exchange of letters between Mailer and Beat poet Michael McClure renders the flat authoritarianism of “The White Negro” as questionable, dialectic, and even chronologically false: Mailer’s letters to McClure certainly weigh in an approval of the occult ethnographies and mythologi-
{{pg|232|233}}cal wizardry of the Beat writers. Much of McClure’s correspondence date to 1964, and show an anxious McClure trying to publish a novel and some short manuscripts including “Untitled Novel,” “Ghost Tantras,” and “Mad Cub.” The letters from McClure, far in excess of what Mailer writes back—reflect a proselytizing tone, an aggressive eagerness to suggest beatnik ideas in the post-Beat era. One such letter, dated from February 1964, includes his rendition of the beatnik “legend” of writing mythology. What also becomes clear from this letter is McClure’s admiration of Mailer: he is close to idolizing Mailer as a literary godfather who can help him with his publishing fiction and poetry attests to a very different social and intellectual imagination than the curt criticisms found in “The White Negro.” Letters from Mailer are comparatively short, even handwritten. Letters from McClure are voluminous and copious in number. Mankind’s subconscious motivations, too, are an important theme in Mailer’s most acclaimed novels. What is less known was his appreciation of the mythological and anthropological adventuring of the Beats, and the impact of narco-criticism that could identify a very different dynamic to the motions of the psychic organism through drugs. Of course, we should be cognizant of the fact that the literary conventions of 1964 were very different from those of 1957. Clearly, however, Mailer is moved by the literary possibilities for conscious expansion and occult mythologies as they might derive or enhance American spirit.

On February 17, 1964, Mailer responded and expressed the visible tension between refinement and animate penning of self- and world-mythology that through the portrait of the writer gives credence to the art of discovery and self-promotion through writing. Mailer’s cautionary disdain is matched with an approval of the writing scene and the promotion of art and culture through writing, rather than an overstatement of the dilemmas of social realism. While far from a complete reversal of opinions and criticism in “The White Negro,” the anxiety of mentorship is given new impetus because of the cultural gap between the conservative-leaning 1950s and the explosive, global, revolutionary 1960s. Mailer projects an educated responsibility. He tacitly admits the relevance of liberalism and occultism in a less homogenous world, and coincides with some of the possibilities for excavating a modern epistemology against the tides of materialism and authoritarianism. “Flesh of the form” directly translates Sampas’s 1942 letter to Kerouac as that of authorial progeny—what could be said about the modern development of American manhood could be as easily said about the influence of writing {{pg|233|234}}on one’s imagination, and suggests a maybe-ambivalent directioning of the Beatnik social and intellectual “possibility” {{sfn|Kerouac|1996}}. Egoistic granting of cultural status through writing modifies considerably the art of social revolution. What is clear is that Mailer recognizes in the Beat Generation a potential that was completely rejected by him at the embryonic time when the Beats were completely unrecognized and unpublished, not a factor at all in the making of ideas on the political world stage. That Mailer recognizes something going on that is subtle yet dramatically impactive borrows directly from his assuming tutelage to an ever-growing population of renegades—he has incorporated the concept of “beatnik” into his idea of the modern selfhood through the mask of writing itself. Mailer’s passion for the ego-soul and for the imaging and fame of American consciousness is here greatly altered and suggestive of a very new stage of development for him.

Mailer’s fairly paternal tone is contrastive with the general disapproval of publishers for “renegade” literatures that praise rebellion, animate power, and the ecstatic. We should, of course, remember that publishers denied Kerouac his attainment of literary glory for twelve years—and that most Beat novels and poetry were shunned or bowdlerized by editorial interpretations designed to protect doctrines of American conservatism. In the genesis of “Flower Power” and hippiedom, replete with animate, environmental, and occult glories, many literary greats presided over a degenerated bunch of would-be writers with no true talent. Paul Bowles’s Itesa apartment in Tangier was a classic example of the engine of failure when it came to collaborative re-invention of the modernist form, with many writers appearing at his apartment in a scheme of literary disfocus and psychic abandonment unreconcilable with the business of true literary production. We could even make much of the excursion of hipsters and hippies to remote regions of the world. That literary genius involved far-off travel implies the unsaleable quality of these ideas and the weakness and embryonic passiveness of those truly “fighting” the establishment and the military-industrial complex. The subject matter for McClure’s letters includes digests of ''Mad Cub'' and ''Ghost Tantras''. Both are tributes to primal, essential, animate reclamation of instinct and poetic animateness. Written in the early 1960s, they restate Sampas’s letter and the debacle between officialism and animate ownership of the psyche, the earth, and primordial consciousness. It is suggestible, of course, that Mailer saw enough self-characteristics in these narrations, but the pop-
{{pg|234|235}}ular message is clear enough. By 1964, Mailer saw in McClure what he would deny of Kerouac. He understood that “Beat” or “beatnik” inveighed a general sense of the development of modern Western man, and could not as easily confine the Beat literary works to a colonial scheming of its characters and ideas. That the “last” meeting of the Beat Generation takes place in 1964 in San Francisco heralds a “new” beginning, one in which literary production could be divorced from its older mentors and hence some of the political idealism that informed them. Mailer, by being paternalistic and circumspect, divines the prospect of literary acquisition as a developable strand of his own literary genius, and a recalculation of literary possibility to influence culture and therefore move forward the architectonic of American selfhood in the Modern Era. Mailer’s tone, in the letters, shows moments of warmth, authorial reciprocity in communications, and the lingering anxiety of publishing and its expectations from the writer. A shared anxiety is continuously documented in lieu of the 1964 political elections in the US.

Mailer was also commissioned by Allen Ginsberg and other Beat writers to testify against the censoring of Burroughs’s novel, ''Naked Lunch'', which was finally cleared of American censorship in 1966. Mailer testified that
<blockquote>We are richer for [Burroughs’s] record; and we are more impressive as a nation because a publisher can print that record and sell it in an open bookstore, sell it legally. It even offers a hint that the “Great Society,” which Lyndon Johnson speaks of, may not be merely a politician’s high wind, but indeed may have the hard seed of a new truth; for no ordinary society could have the bravery and moral honesty to stare down into the abyss of ''Naked Lunch''. But a Great Society can look into the chasm of its own potential Hell and recognize that it is stronger as a nation for possessing an artist who can come back from Hell with a portrait of its dimensions. {{sfn|Naked|1992|p=XVII-XIX}}</blockquote>
Mailer’s message here is very obvious—as a nation and as a “collective soul,” America and its conception of democracy are expanded and strengthened by the existence of drug-addicted literary genius. The phrasing of “dimensions of Hell” repeats the doctrine of American “learning” rather than the diminution, comedism, and nihilism of surrealist writers who also used drugs. We almost feel that Mailer believes that taking drugs is a step towards {{pg|235|236}}totalistic self-redemption and even cultural-historical redemption, an answering of the seemingly meaningless and jocular decay of the earlier beatniks who praised Black and other minorities for spawning the adulation of excess. Yet there is also an authorial recognition of grandeur and achievement: Burroughs may easily be mismatched against the United States Government in the sense that Burroughs’s written and social understandings of drugs, consciousness, addiction, and “culture” was far greater and considerably more objective and human. It is also very likely that Mailer saw reasons to praise Burroughs where he would have been reluctant to do so for Kerouac, that he recognized a gutsier and more cerebrated authorship and the promise of a more durable idealism. Surely, in the early part of the Twentieth Century, man’s understanding of narcotics was far from literary. Once again, the literary medium is a common ground, a moment of psychosocial development away from colonial or “Jim Crow” barbarizations meant to racialize and therefore diminish the true impact of suffering and intoxication upon the modern self. There is also an implied note of recognition of the changes in popular culture. Mailer’s comparatively centrist ''metier'' develops a much broader social understanding of drugs and their arguable utility in a rapidly changing world. Gone are the fantasies and undefined adventures that meshed with Victorian portraits of horror, and ushered in is a definable modern subject that is ''a part of'' the modern reality, lingual and otherwise. Mailer attempts this without giving any credence to occult or multicultural possibilities for experience: he is soberly realistic and attempts to incorporate a divergent stream of texts and their signification into the mainstream setting. Mailer’s typing of Burroughs as a “religious” writer maintains some of the traditional mask. However, he concurs with the portrait of a profound if terrifying reflection on the mind and its lingual construction of experience. His identifying religion and damnation give credence to the contemporary concept of drugs and rehabilitation, while escaping them by stressing “the real” and its influence on the modern society. The impulse to democratization, or rather a recognition of the form and humanity of drug-addicted experience, projects without much reservation the idea of a maturing spirit that is older, wiser, and with a greater grasp of psychic agency. Authoritarian dogma, then, is not refuted but rather channeled into a more intimate discussion, one favorable to the individual and to social freedoms. Although Mailer is not a strong proponent of the legalization of drugs, he certainly recognizes that writing about drugs contributed {{pg|236|237}}to a greater understanding, and maybe even the redemption, of man from his long-standing social and personal ills.

'''LITERARY COMPARISONS:'''

'''THE PROSPECT OF LITERARY GENIUS IN MODERN AMERICA, AND THE ESTIMATION OF MODERN CHARACTER'''

Whatever may be said about Mailer’s strong points of criticism in “The White Negro,” which was published the same year as ''On The Road'', Mailer’s publication of ''The Village Voice'' from the 1960s attests to his modifying presence, and even the expansion of “beatnik” into other areas of modern consciousness and social learning. A particularly interesting point of introduction came from Al Aronowitz’s May 18, 1960 column in ''The Village Voice'':
<blockquote>But actually Kerouac and Mailer have long been literary brothers, even if under each other’s skin. Which one founded the Beat Generation and which one merely found it is just a matter of semantics.... Perhaps it might be concluded that, in one way, Mailer found in his own mind what Kerouac found throughout America.</blockquote>
If the comparisons are misleading, they at least call to attention how both authors captured modern man’s impalement with both the outside world and with memory: the decidedly different paths to literary glory that are encapsulated in a comparison between “America” and “the mind” makes literary comparisons between the two men more problematic—that Mailer could be interpreted as mentalizing the anxiety of “beatnik” legend suggests a parallel writing of selfhood from external and internal experiences. The statement of literary co-writing could not be biographically more certain: both men served in the war, and forecasted their discoveries onto a new-fangled American who belonged as much to the world as to his particular region. Therefore, an exposition of literary and character similarities proposes a considerably greater selfhood and the alterity of the lens. Reading Mailer through the literary and character conventions of Kerouac deepens the anxiety and soul-redemptions of Spengler’s primary statement of civilizational “decline,” and maybe the impetus towards a rejuvenated social learning. Since the publication career of Mailer and Kerouac is very close in origin— {{pg|237|238}}Kerouac published his first novel one year after Mailer his—we may turn to the prospect of literary similarity and the makings of cultural and countercultural depth without referring to complex theoretical strategies that would make their core ideas seem radically and racially different.

The character identities, memories, and dislocative dreaming of ''The Naked and the Dead'' positively anticipates the legend of beatnik discovery and adventure; further, the stress in this novel is upon humanity, identity, and emotional attachment in a no man’s land of carnage and alienation. Mailer and Kerouac both address the spiritual decimation of the modern American. They call attention to the semiotic parameters of exile and self-diminution against the glowing possibility of “Pax Americana.” Both authors tread heavily on the same psychic/cultural ground: they match the tactility and emotional happinesses of humanity against the spectacle of a debilitating nightmare of a powerful abyss. Both authors struggle to match the inhumanity, moreover, of external or “foreign” cultures against the certainty of an American imagination of selfhood. Without approaching the emotional dread for what Jean-François Lyotard termed in postmodern literature the continuous revolution of forms, {{sfn|Lyotard|1984|p=10}} Mailer spindles dream, memory, and emotional renditions of faith against the hungering stresses of democracy and camaraderie in a dangerous military no-man’s land, passively anticipating a coming “New Era” that assembles memory against the threat of totalitarian mind-control. In many instances, very real tensions and hierarchical dimensions are muted so as to receive the delicious individuation and democratizing touch of pre-War dreaming: we are led to the confirmation of a deeply pensive American subject anxiously wandering through the intellectual transformation of his world. More succinctly, though, Mailer parallels Kerouacian impulses to inscribe emotions—love, the body, rusticity, and tactility as the architectonic of democratic “spirit.” We are ritualized subjects who imbibe in the indistinct and unpredictable mem-oirs of an older America that exuded a dramatic moment of self-satisfaction and refinement in its making of political theory. Fighting the inhuman standardizations of “post”-ness, too, is a valiant literary assemblage of facts and self-delineation. The American man’s sensoryness is the backdrop to his liberated self, his quest for personal redemption in a utopic world symbolizing his ethos borrowed from American community. Mark Cirino writes the following:
{{pg|238|239}}<blockquote>Fitzgerald and others have misconstrued aspects of Hemingway’s objectives, which Mailer grasped intuitively and intellectually. The central thrust to Hemingway’s literary project was to dramatize the compromised functioning of thought as the modern consciousness is incorporated into the violent activities of the twentieth-century man of action... (Hemingway) is disclosing the tension that defines his work, the internal struggle between a man of action and a man of thought.{{sfn|Cirino|2010|p=126}}</blockquote>
Yet the soldier’s reflection, or rather the peculiar moment of that reflection on one’s past, is what produces mankind’s idea of community, ethicality, and beauty. Notwithstanding the tremendous filmic possibilities of a quasi-pastoralist moment of reflection, “beatnik” accelerates the possibilities for an expanded romanticism: it draws memory, dream, and conversation against the tide of oppression, while Americanizing an anti-rational moment of cultural topos. Vulgarizing self-portrayals, moreover, project Sampas’s thematic idea of a “crude, raw, unfinished—superb” American being: more important, though, is the depth of similarity in terms of modern man’s cultural realization of himself.{{sfn|Kerouac|1996|p=69}} While modernism, akin to William Faulkner’s writing of internal memory in ''The Sound and the Fury'', is textualized through the narrative moment of confinement to the island of Anopopei, a pressingly beatnik sentiment is shared among a multi-ethnic troop which is bemusing the collective impact of humanity in the modern ''ethos'', painted in terms concrete, sensory, and lingual.

Scenes of romantic sensualism, as was common to Kerouac and certainly a major tour de force in Kerouac’s first novel, ''The Town And The City'', confirm the poeticity of American man’s modern journey to validate democracy and democratization. They also stage modern American man’s much-anticipated confrontation of undemocratic “post” officialism and conservatism. We could, of course, understand the kind of cultural-political battling between the two men when we read statements like these:
<div class="center" style="width: auto; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;">

'''POLACK''': (falsetto voice) I don’t know why I’m not more popular with the girls . . . I’m such an easy lay. (They all laugh.)

'''BROWN''': What do you think your girl friend is doing now? I’ll tell you what. It’s just about six A.M. now in America. She’s wakin’ up in bed with a guy who can give her just as much as you</div>

{{pg|239|240}}<div class="center" style="width: auto; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;">can, and she’s giving him the same goddam line she handed you. I tell you, Minetta, there ain’t a one of them you can trust. They’ll all cheat on you.

'''POLACK''': There ain’t a fuggin woman is any good.

'''MINETTA''': (weakly) Well, I ain’t worrying.

'''STANLEY''': It’s different with me. I got a kid.
'''BROWN''': The ones with kids are the worst. They’re the ones who’re bored and really need a good time. There ain’t a woman is worth a goddam.{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=185-186}}</div>

Of course, soldiers musing about their wives’ cheating habits restates the basic antagonism, both political and physical, between Mailer and Kerouac. One is out on the battlefield, away from the pleasures of life, perhaps stiffening his resolve and making him less likely to be lenient about social policy, while the other is mostly at home, free to expostulate the labyrinthine and otherwise juicy moments of pleasurable transcendence from the ordinary. Sexual jealousy, or “fighting for cunts,” probably influenced the medium of writing as much as it symbolized modern man’s quest for self-realization. It also deliciously problematizes Sampas’s statement of a “crude, raw, unfinished—superb” meta-modern man developing in the American context. While Mailer’s dramatization of romantic and sexual anxiety in ''The Naked And The Dead'' interrupts the syntactic form of being where Kerouac is free to propound and expostulate an ebullient and geographically diverse rebellion, Mailer’s account more dramatically stages the crises of modern American maleness, registering it as a psychic challenge to bring forth ethical and cultural vision in a changing world. Chapters exhuming memories of life before the war, entitled “The Time Machine,” represent a deeper sensual underpinning to the making of modern American selfhood and calculates the weight of modernist anxieties against the resilience of man’s spirit—economy, sexuality, faith, imagination, travel, education and psychology arrange the depth of modernist literary innovation and modern man’s social panic within the form of American male character. They restate the anxiety and possibility of man’s grasp of the “new” world without determining the ultimate course of action. That at least could predate Kerouac’s childhood memoirs in ''The Town And The City'': restating un-patriotic or hyper-patriotic moments of jingoism and hereticism predated the ro- {{pg|240|241}}mantic emphasis upon discovery, while nestling it in a crux of modern ultimacy that is inescapable rather than pleasantly redrawable.

In this segment, I compare and contrast three of the “Time Machine” chapters, which are Red Valsen, The Wandering Ministrel; Robert Hearn, The Addled Womb; and Joey Goldstein, The Cove of Brooklyn. In all three, the anxiety of being is coupled with the anticipation and imperfectness of man’s knowledge of a changing world that presents a new, challenging dynamic of political ideation and capitalist-cultural-metatechnologies that outmanuver the will and action of the American male self. The contrast between depressive novels such as William Faulkner’s ''The Sound And The Fury'', where a Harvard student commits suicide, and later modernisms such as Ernest Hemingway’s ''The Old Man And The Sea'', where an old fishermen doffs the outside world to restate his greatest quest within nature, mean to belabor the moment of modern anxiety in the development and redevelopment of self. Mailer’s soldiers are less emasculated than Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s ''Ulysses'' or Walter Mitty in the stories of James Thurber, but whether gay, roguish, or ethnic, they internalize the languages and imaginations of a newly cast modern world that tends to erase the ebullient masculine pastoralism of works such as Sherwood Anderson’s ''Winesburg, Ohio'' that molded a conception of modern man’s achievement through work, capitalism, education, and cultural longevity and maturity. Thus, the throbbing moment of self-doubt is captured against the spectacle of a powerful mass cultural redevelopment. It could be said that Mailer had thought through modern man’s special list of psychic and personal issues before Kerouac was to relocate them to physically and sensually liberating fantasy. American modernist novels, whether crammed with political news developments or littered with unlikely-sounding advertisements, elongate the spectacle of modern life and its circumstances—broadening, then, long-standing conceptions of American character and spirit rooted in premodern scripturalism and economic ingenuity, which must re-invent themselves as monumental counterweights to the infinite and coercive determinants of modern political realism. In the balance was a seemingly intractable American lingual, psychic, and cultural selfhood that was likely to tune out political ideas and even suppress them. Indeed, American notions of the outside world were far from objective and certain to overlook or misrepresent politically active beliefs and ideals as contrary to democracy and pluralism.

“The Wandering Ministrel” snapshots moments of Kerouacian rusticism {{pg|241|242}}and junked-out splendor. At reflective moments, the story of a coal-miner’s son facing the economic depression of his land falls into hoboed moments of brilliance long before Kerouac narrated them into the story of Cody Pomeray, in ''Visions of Cody'': “To a kid from a mining town, getting drunk in a flatcar on Saturday night is still fun. The horizon extends for a million miles over the silver cornfields.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=226}} Sensualism also accompanies education, employment, and sexuality without dismissing or diminishing the emotions and conversations around social responsibility: “The Wandering Ministrel” finds Red facing as a youth the problems of economic depression and ethnocentric distaste for new generations of Americans from European and Euro-Jewish stock. “Sensualism” also renders the proliferation of technology in a spirit more dense and spiritualizing than that of Kerouac. Rather than technology being inferior to or less lyrically promotive than the cultural, natural, and ecstatic, technology chronologizes modern man’s social and intellectual development and mediates in a spirit friendly with American male rhetoric and personality:
<blockquote>In ‘thirty-five he works in a restaurant for almost a year, the best dishwasher they ever had. (The rush hour lasts from twelve to three at that end of the kitchen. The dishes come clanking down the dumbwaiter, and the tray man mops the food and grease with his hand, fingers the lipstick on the glasses to loosen it, and drops them in a rack. In the machine, the steam vibrates and sings, whips out at the other end, where the finish man pulls out the tray with tongs, and wiggles the plates with his fingertips as he flips them on a pile. You don’t grab it with your bare hand, Jack.){{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=228}}</blockquote>
The thrill of sex, moreover, stages the economic and social anxieties of the post-World War II American rather than embolden a non-economic mobilization of transcendence, thereby equating the sensual with the realistic. We should remember that Kerouac’s motivations to render poetic and timeless the ecstatic or otherwise extra-normal pleasures and escapes of his generation rose from a materialistic spirit of confidence that permitted the ambitious re-drawing of the modern American experience. The staging of marital, sexual, and familial decline answers the tide of modern freedoms, both intellectual and sensual:
{{pg|242|243}}<poem style="margin-left:2em; float:left;">
You know, I’ll tell ya something, I don’t believe in God.
::You don’t mean that, Red!
::(Underneath the blanket his father’s body had been crushed
almost flat.) Yeah, that’s right, I just don’t believe in God.
::Sometimes I don’t either, Agnes says.
::Yeah, I can talk to you, ''you'' understand.
::Only you want to go away.
::Well. (There is the other knowledge. Her body is young and
strong and he knows the smell of her breasts, which are like powdered infant-flesh, but all the women turn to cordwood in the town.) You take that guy Joe Mackey who got Alice with a kid and left her, my own sister, but I tell ya I don’t blame him. You got to see that, Agnes.
::You’re cruel.
::Yeah, that’s right. It’s praise to the eighteen-year-old.{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=224}}</poem>

“The Addled Womb” counter-creates “beatnik” to locate anxiety and doubt rather than aggressive countercultural critique. We may even hypothesize the envisioning of a deeper and more centrist rendition of poet Allen Ginsberg, a confirmed homosexual who rigorously and polemically applied Marxist critique to the military-industrial complex. The opening stanzas in- scribe the power and magnificence of mid-century America in terms of civilizational ''topos'': “No one ever really comprehends it, the vast table of America,”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=328}} but the substitution of modern man’s nihilism instead of his faith and redemptive feelings counter-strategizes “beatnik” by proposing establishment and authority to inhere a classic moment of self-introspection, with layers of beneficence and destruction that rhetorically present tenacity rather than re-invention: “How do you conceive your own death, your own unimportance in all that man-created immensity, through all the marble vaults and brick ridges and the furnaces that lead to the market place? You always believe somehow that the world will end with your death. It is all more intense, more violent, more rutted than life anywhere else.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=328}}

True, the discordant gauging of Hearn between destruction, or conscious realization of destruction, and the gleeful portrait of the vices and pleasures of capitalist making, “AN AIRLINE TICKET TO ROMANTIC PLACES, and the touch and smell of young girls, lipstick odor, powder odor, and the svelte lean scent of leather on the seats of convertibles,”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=334}} challenges the psy- {{pg|243|244}}chic and spiritual re-invention of American selfhood through the lens of “beatniks” seeking instead occultism and ethnolingualisms that could, too, render the modern psyche more tenacious and redemptive. Ruggedness of personality performs the rejection of anti-capitalist calls to “revolution” while inviting Kerouacian masculinity: “For a little while it is all quite glorious. They are wise and aware and sick and the world outside is corrupt and they are the only ones who know it.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=340}} Yet the inclusion of communist pretenders such as Jansen, or even his presentation of Oswald Spengler commenting on “an acquisitive society,”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=340}} gives us a dialectic that Kerouac and Ginsberg craved and continually re-wrote to express increasing knowledge of what was “beyond” the American mainstream, or even military-industrial complex. Hearn’s recurrent meditations on topos, technology, and rebellion anticipates the multicultural and multi-lifestyle possibilities for a new-fangled democracy with a much greater comprehension of the world. Into this, we may draw the soldiers at Anopopei and the freaks of Greenwich Village as mutual selves: the idea or façade of negotiation and communication is archetypally drawn as a struggle for ideological realization.

Interestingly enough, the strongest instance of romantic/sensual redemption through romantic love is the province of a Jewish soldier, Joey Goldstein. “The Cove of Brooklyn” stages achievement and knowledge, and the monetary realization of that knowledge, against stereotypes and depressive urban characteristics that perform ethnic and racial subjugation; in the context of ''The Naked and the Dead'', we may easily devise cultural and sensual rejuvenation as a mode of being and a learning of selfhood in an American social fabric ruled by racialism and racial denigration. Sexual anxiety and the emotional depth of romantic encounters were common to the writing of Jewish-American writers—from Bernard Malamud’s ''The Assistant'' to Isaac Bashevis Singer’s ambitious medieval fairy-tale ''The Slave'', we might underscore a redemptive theme to sexual lust as a being-creating metaphor that offsets both the severeness of Judaic religious conservatism and the constant tension between Jews and Christians who either envy them or wish to violently quell their religious difference. Goldstein happens through a characteristic tale of urban nurturing and economic self-realization. He falls in love and marries, then has a family. Social liminality is re-written optimistically and within a spirit of masculine confidence: “Shy sensitive girls may end up as poetesses or they may turn bitter and drink alone in bars, but nice shy sensitive Jewish girls usually marry and have children, gain two pounds {{pg|244|245}}a year, and worry more about refurbishing hats and trying a new casserole than about the meaning of life.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=487}} It was, of course, a classically beatnik ''ouevre'' to try and write the romantic and erotic generativity of the non- White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant man or woman, but Beat Generation novels and poems were less adept at recognizing the economic and social “success,” by mainstream terms: the covert brilliance of “the Other” was carefully guarded, a kind of secret that had evocative psychological power. Goldstein’s relationship with Natalie, and specifically the romantic death of that relationship during the maternity of the second child, projects a very different positioning of “the ethnic.” His/her social and cultural success, rather than promoting multi-ethnic ecstasies, strengthens ethnic traditions while focusing a point of modern, urban social maturity:
<blockquote>They expand, put on weight, and give money to charitable organizations to help refugees. They are sincere and friendly and happy, and nearly everyone likes them. As their son grows older, begins to talk, there are any number of pleasures they draw from him. They are content and the habits of marriage lap about them like a warm bath. They never feel great joy but they are rarely depressed, and nothing immediate is ever excessive or cruel. {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=491}}</blockquote>
Jack Kerouac does not narrate the ethnic citizen’s realization of community and success until 1965 with the publication of ''Desolation Angels''. Mailer’s centrism, by contrast, envisions the spectacle of “beatnik” as a kind of temptation, an allure, to a spiritual outcome that is uncalculated and therefore misleading. Presenting the “Jewish” story, of course, overlooks very real gaps of cross-cultural understanding that Mailer deliberately puts in his soldiers: the positive xenophobia, plus the distortions of non-Western peoples such as the Japanese, again seriously distort any kind of populist or democratic ideal for a “Pax Americana.” Mailer’s penning of Goldstein diminishes the demographic and geographic concept of “the Other,” while retaining him as a modern subject borne of the fruit of social pluralism. Although the scope of otherness is limited, again a counter-thrust to beatnik eclecticism is given a very positive bearing, one which competes with narrated racisms to the present day.

We should remember that Mailer was a writer who faced the same crisis as the Beat Generation: that of publishing to earn a living. Still, Aronowitz’s {{pg|245|246}}essay underscores what we are often likely to dismiss—that their coinciding in the early 1940s breathed a kind of social estimation of American community and overall outlook. The harsh criticism, too, of “The White Negro,” although a key theme of Mailer’s recurrent centrism, veils a moment of social being that is the continuing effort and development of authorial translations of culture. Paraphrasing Oswald Spengler—for many critics the godfather of “Beat”—he establishes the continuity of literature instead of its schizophrenic and hasty re-drawing of consciousness and experience to suit political needs. In short, Mailer’s anticipation of the Beat Generation sustained a continuing moment of literary discovery: we find a delicious sort of foil that forecasts the problem and the praxis of modern American man’s social achievement.

===Citations===
{{reflist|20em}}

===Works Cited===
{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}
* {{cite book |last=Anderson |first=Sherwood |date=2005 |title=Winesburg, Ohio |location= New York|publisher=Signet |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Aronowitz |first=Alfred G. |date=18 May 1960 |title=Rev. of ''The Beats'', by Seymour Krim |work=The Village Voice |pages=1+ |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Chandarlapaty |first=Raj |date=2009 |title=The Beat Generation and Counterculture: Paul Bowles, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac |location=New York |publisher=Peter Lang |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Cirino |first=Mark |title=Norman Mailer’s ''The Fight'': Hemingway, Bullfighting, and the Lovely Metaphysics of Boxing |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=123-138 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Faulkner |first=William |date=1993 |title=The Sound and the Fury |editor-last1=Minter |editor-first1=David |location=New York |publisher=W.W.Norton |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1996 |title=The Old Man and The Sea |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Joyce |first=James |date=2011 |title=Ulysses |location=Oxford |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Kerouac |first=Jack |date=1996 |title=Selected Letters 1940–1956 |editor-last1=Charters |editor-first1=Ann |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Kerouac |first=Jack |authormask=1 |date=1948 |title=The Town and The City |location=New York |publisher=Harcourt Brace & Co |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Kerouac |first=Jack |authormask=1 |date=1972 |title=Visions of Cody |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lyotard |first=Jean-François |date=1984 |title=The Postmodern Condition |location=Minneapolis |publisher=U of Minnesota P |ref=harv }}
* {{cite letter |first=Norman |last=Mailer |subject= Letter to Michael McClure |date=17 February 1964 |location=University of Texas-Austin |publisher=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1959 |title= “The White Negro.” Advertisements for Myself |location=New York |publisher=G.P. Putnam’s Sons |pages=337-58 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Malamud |first=Bernard |date=1958 |title=The Assistant |location=New York |publisher=Signet |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=McClure |first=Michael |date=1969 |title=Ghost Tantras |location=San Francisco |publisher=Four Seasons Foundation |ref=harv }}
* {{cite letter |last=McClure |first=Michael |authormask=1 |subject= Letter to Norman Mailer |date=Feb 1964 |location=University of Texas-Austin |publisher=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=McClure |first=Michael |authormask=1 |date=1970 |title=Mad Cub |location=New York |publisher=Bantam |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |date=1992 |chapter=Naked Lunch on Trial |title=Naked Lunch. By William S. Burroughs |location=New York |publisher=Grove Press |pages=IX-XXXIV |ref= {{harvid|Naked|1992 }}}}
* {{cite book |last=Singer |first=Isaac Bashevis |date=1988 |title=The Slave |location=New York |publisher=Farrar, Straus and Giroux |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Thurber |first=James |date=2000 |title=The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and Other Pieces |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |ref=harv }}

{{Review|state=expanded}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Through the Lens of the Beatniks: Norman Mailer and Modern American Man’s Quest for Self-Realization}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Through the Lens of the Beatniks: Norman Mailer and Modern American Man’s Quest for Self-Realization

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{{Byline|last=Chandarlapaty|first=Raj|abstract=An analysis of the relationship, similarities, and cultural connections between Mailer and the major Beat writers. |note=My thanks to the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin for permission to examine the Norman Mailer archives in researching this essay.}}
{{dc|dc=F|ew mid-century writers were friendly}} with the Beat Generation. Most, including Norman Mailer, cited their criminal and licentious impulses as an undermining tangling of ethically strong American sensibilities. I have noted Mailer’s criticism found in “The White Negro,” where Mailer sketched the unkempt and ghettoized portrait of white rebels such as Neal Cassady. Whether it is Mailer, Arthur Miller, or left poet-rockers such as Bob Dylan, or even fiction writers such as Truman Capote, the recurring message of a degenerated gang of would-be hoodlums abandoning mainstream lifestyles remained a cynical counter-step to the endless innovations and cultural adventurism that was unheard of for most Americans in the 1950s.

I realized that I had visited the literary spectacle of Norman Mailer but a few times: once, as a child, when ''The Executioner’s Song'' aired on ABC in 1980, and then, in 2007 when Mailer died at the age of 84. While a graduate student, I thought that he was compared unfavorably to Capote, with Mailer a kind of “copier,” an imitator of Capote’s much more virtuous meditation on crime and human psychology. The essays were very much in Capote’s favor. While reading ''The Naked and the Dead'', I began to understand something wholly detached from the occult glory, fame, and entertainer-super- star-politician thread that Mailer is famous for colonizing: Mailer was definitely interested in narrating the cerebration of modern man’s social and civic problems, and perhaps the direct challenge to American humankind’s {{pg|231|232}}democratic spirit when faced with the powerful and nature-deciding apparatus of institutions and authoritarianism. He writes the following of “The League of Omnipotent Men”:
<blockquote>You could kill the dozen men, and there would be another dozen to replace them, and another and another. Out of all the vast pressures and crosscurrents of history was evolving the archetype of twentieth-century man. The ''particular'' man who would direct it, make certain that “the natural role ...was anxiety.” The techniques had outraced the psyche. “The majority of men must be subservient to the machine and it’s not a business they instinctively enjoy.” And in the marginal area, the gap, were the peculiar tensions that birthed the dream. {{sfn|Mailer|1948}}</blockquote>
As a whole, ''The Naked and the Dead'' snapshots very familiar wartime ground—the ethnic and racial jokes, the longing for sexuality and the thrust of jealousy, the protected incomprehension of foreign cultures that impaled American democracy with the very real contention that American mankind was simply not humanly prepared to lead the world at all. There is much more: first, this novel captures American manhood’s very real and gnawing psychic doubts and missteps, while dreamily transposing the economic and tactile miracle of long-standing American prosperity. Second, tactility is established in the above passage akin to the sentiments of Jack Kerouac—that in a modern world, we should lose our animate confidence, pride, and basically our intellectual ability to manage the fruit of both changing times and world responsibility. What I intend to depict in this essay, then, is Mailer’s increasing, if guarded, approval for some of the character and ethnographic foci of Beat writers. The letters and testimonies gathered from Harry Ransom Center overstate the anxiety, terror, and illuminating potential of the far-reaching hand of the new generation of literary bohemians, and therefore Mailer’s recognition that both democracy and culture would be in some way transformed by this shaded lens of cultural hereticism.

A remarkable exchange of letters between Mailer and Beat poet Michael McClure renders the flat authoritarianism of “The White Negro” as questionable, dialectic, and even chronologically false: Mailer’s letters to McClure certainly weigh in an approval of the occult ethnographies and mythologi-
{{pg|232|233}}cal wizardry of the Beat writers. Much of McClure’s correspondence date to 1964, and show an anxious McClure trying to publish a novel and some short manuscripts including “Untitled Novel,” “Ghost Tantras,” and “Mad Cub.” The letters from McClure, far in excess of what Mailer writes back—reflect a proselytizing tone, an aggressive eagerness to suggest beatnik ideas in the post-Beat era. One such letter, dated from February 1964, includes his rendition of the beatnik “legend” of writing mythology. What also becomes clear from this letter is McClure’s admiration of Mailer: he is close to idolizing Mailer as a literary godfather who can help him with his publishing fiction and poetry attests to a very different social and intellectual imagination than the curt criticisms found in “The White Negro.” Letters from Mailer are comparatively short, even handwritten. Letters from McClure are voluminous and copious in number. Mankind’s subconscious motivations, too, are an important theme in Mailer’s most acclaimed novels. What is less known was his appreciation of the mythological and anthropological adventuring of the Beats, and the impact of narco-criticism that could identify a very different dynamic to the motions of the psychic organism through drugs. Of course, we should be cognizant of the fact that the literary conventions of 1964 were very different from those of 1957. Clearly, however, Mailer is moved by the literary possibilities for conscious expansion and occult mythologies as they might derive or enhance American spirit.

On February 17, 1964, Mailer responded and expressed the visible tension between refinement and animate penning of self- and world-mythology that through the portrait of the writer gives credence to the art of discovery and self-promotion through writing. Mailer’s cautionary disdain is matched with an approval of the writing scene and the promotion of art and culture through writing, rather than an overstatement of the dilemmas of social realism. While far from a complete reversal of opinions and criticism in “The White Negro,” the anxiety of mentorship is given new impetus because of the cultural gap between the conservative-leaning 1950s and the explosive, global, revolutionary 1960s. Mailer projects an educated responsibility. He tacitly admits the relevance of liberalism and occultism in a less homogenous world, and coincides with some of the possibilities for excavating a modern epistemology against the tides of materialism and authoritarianism. “Flesh of the form” directly translates Sampas’s 1942 letter to Kerouac as that of authorial progeny—what could be said about the modern development of American manhood could be as easily said about the influence of writing {{pg|233|234}}on one’s imagination, and suggests a maybe-ambivalent directioning of the Beatnik social and intellectual “possibility” {{sfn|Kerouac|1996}}. Egoistic granting of cultural status through writing modifies considerably the art of social revolution. What is clear is that Mailer recognizes in the Beat Generation a potential that was completely rejected by him at the embryonic time when the Beats were completely unrecognized and unpublished, not a factor at all in the making of ideas on the political world stage. That Mailer recognizes something going on that is subtle yet dramatically impactive borrows directly from his assuming tutelage to an ever-growing population of renegades—he has incorporated the concept of “beatnik” into his idea of the modern selfhood through the mask of writing itself. Mailer’s passion for the ego-soul and for the imaging and fame of American consciousness is here greatly altered and suggestive of a very new stage of development for him.

Mailer’s fairly paternal tone is contrastive with the general disapproval of publishers for “renegade” literatures that praise rebellion, animate power, and the ecstatic. We should, of course, remember that publishers denied Kerouac his attainment of literary glory for twelve years—and that most Beat novels and poetry were shunned or bowdlerized by editorial interpretations designed to protect doctrines of American conservatism. In the genesis of “Flower Power” and hippiedom, replete with animate, environmental, and occult glories, many literary greats presided over a degenerated bunch of would-be writers with no true talent. Paul Bowles’s Itesa apartment in Tangier was a classic example of the engine of failure when it came to collaborative re-invention of the modernist form, with many writers appearing at his apartment in a scheme of literary disfocus and psychic abandonment unreconcilable with the business of true literary production. We could even make much of the excursion of hipsters and hippies to remote regions of the world. That literary genius involved far-off travel implies the unsaleable quality of these ideas and the weakness and embryonic passiveness of those truly “fighting” the establishment and the military-industrial complex. The subject matter for McClure’s letters includes digests of ''Mad Cub'' and ''Ghost Tantras''. Both are tributes to primal, essential, animate reclamation of instinct and poetic animateness. Written in the early 1960s, they restate Sampas’s letter and the debacle between officialism and animate ownership of the psyche, the earth, and primordial consciousness. It is suggestible, of course, that Mailer saw enough self-characteristics in these narrations, but the pop-
{{pg|234|235}}ular message is clear enough. By 1964, Mailer saw in McClure what he would deny of Kerouac. He understood that “Beat” or “beatnik” inveighed a general sense of the development of modern Western man, and could not as easily confine the Beat literary works to a colonial scheming of its characters and ideas. That the “last” meeting of the Beat Generation takes place in 1964 in San Francisco heralds a “new” beginning, one in which literary production could be divorced from its older mentors and hence some of the political idealism that informed them. Mailer, by being paternalistic and circumspect, divines the prospect of literary acquisition as a developable strand of his own literary genius, and a recalculation of literary possibility to influence culture and therefore move forward the architectonic of American selfhood in the Modern Era. Mailer’s tone, in the letters, shows moments of warmth, authorial reciprocity in communications, and the lingering anxiety of publishing and its expectations from the writer. A shared anxiety is continuously documented in lieu of the 1964 political elections in the US.

Mailer was also commissioned by Allen Ginsberg and other Beat writers to testify against the censoring of Burroughs’s novel, ''Naked Lunch'', which was finally cleared of American censorship in 1966. Mailer testified that
<blockquote>We are richer for [Burroughs’s] record; and we are more impressive as a nation because a publisher can print that record and sell it in an open bookstore, sell it legally. It even offers a hint that the “Great Society,” which Lyndon Johnson speaks of, may not be merely a politician’s high wind, but indeed may have the hard seed of a new truth; for no ordinary society could have the bravery and moral honesty to stare down into the abyss of ''Naked Lunch''. But a Great Society can look into the chasm of its own potential Hell and recognize that it is stronger as a nation for possessing an artist who can come back from Hell with a portrait of its dimensions. {{sfn|Naked|1992|p=XVII-XIX}}</blockquote>
Mailer’s message here is very obvious—as a nation and as a “collective soul,” America and its conception of democracy are expanded and strengthened by the existence of drug-addicted literary genius. The phrasing of “dimensions of Hell” repeats the doctrine of American “learning” rather than the diminution, comedism, and nihilism of surrealist writers who also used drugs. We almost feel that Mailer believes that taking drugs is a step towards {{pg|235|236}}totalistic self-redemption and even cultural-historical redemption, an answering of the seemingly meaningless and jocular decay of the earlier beatniks who praised Black and other minorities for spawning the adulation of excess. Yet there is also an authorial recognition of grandeur and achievement: Burroughs may easily be mismatched against the United States Government in the sense that Burroughs’s written and social understandings of drugs, consciousness, addiction, and “culture” was far greater and considerably more objective and human. It is also very likely that Mailer saw reasons to praise Burroughs where he would have been reluctant to do so for Kerouac, that he recognized a gutsier and more cerebrated authorship and the promise of a more durable idealism. Surely, in the early part of the Twentieth Century, man’s understanding of narcotics was far from literary. Once again, the literary medium is a common ground, a moment of psychosocial development away from colonial or “Jim Crow” barbarizations meant to racialize and therefore diminish the true impact of suffering and intoxication upon the modern self. There is also an implied note of recognition of the changes in popular culture. Mailer’s comparatively centrist ''metier'' develops a much broader social understanding of drugs and their arguable utility in a rapidly changing world. Gone are the fantasies and undefined adventures that meshed with Victorian portraits of horror, and ushered in is a definable modern subject that is ''a part of'' the modern reality, lingual and otherwise. Mailer attempts this without giving any credence to occult or multicultural possibilities for experience: he is soberly realistic and attempts to incorporate a divergent stream of texts and their signification into the mainstream setting. Mailer’s typing of Burroughs as a “religious” writer maintains some of the traditional mask. However, he concurs with the portrait of a profound if terrifying reflection on the mind and its lingual construction of experience. His identifying religion and damnation give credence to the contemporary concept of drugs and rehabilitation, while escaping them by stressing “the real” and its influence on the modern society. The impulse to democratization, or rather a recognition of the form and humanity of drug-addicted experience, projects without much reservation the idea of a maturing spirit that is older, wiser, and with a greater grasp of psychic agency. Authoritarian dogma, then, is not refuted but rather channeled into a more intimate discussion, one favorable to the individual and to social freedoms. Although Mailer is not a strong proponent of the legalization of drugs, he certainly recognizes that writing about drugs contributed {{pg|236|237}}to a greater understanding, and maybe even the redemption, of man from his long-standing social and personal ills.

'''LITERARY COMPARISONS:'''

'''THE PROSPECT OF LITERARY GENIUS IN MODERN AMERICA, AND THE ESTIMATION OF MODERN CHARACTER'''

Whatever may be said about Mailer’s strong points of criticism in “The White Negro,” which was published the same year as ''On The Road'', Mailer’s publication of ''The Village Voice'' from the 1960s attests to his modifying presence, and even the expansion of “beatnik” into other areas of modern consciousness and social learning. A particularly interesting point of introduction came from Al Aronowitz’s May 18, 1960 column in ''The Village Voice'':
<blockquote>But actually Kerouac and Mailer have long been literary brothers, even if under each other’s skin. Which one founded the Beat Generation and which one merely found it is just a matter of semantics.... Perhaps it might be concluded that, in one way, Mailer found in his own mind what Kerouac found throughout America.</blockquote>
If the comparisons are misleading, they at least call to attention how both authors captured modern man’s impalement with both the outside world and with memory: the decidedly different paths to literary glory that are encapsulated in a comparison between “America” and “the mind” makes literary comparisons between the two men more problematic—that Mailer could be interpreted as mentalizing the anxiety of “beatnik” legend suggests a parallel writing of selfhood from external and internal experiences. The statement of literary co-writing could not be biographically more certain: both men served in the war, and forecasted their discoveries onto a new-fangled American who belonged as much to the world as to his particular region. Therefore, an exposition of literary and character similarities proposes a considerably greater selfhood and the alterity of the lens. Reading Mailer through the literary and character conventions of Kerouac deepens the anxiety and soul-redemptions of Spengler’s primary statement of civilizational “decline,” and maybe the impetus towards a rejuvenated social learning. Since the publication career of Mailer and Kerouac is very close in origin— {{pg|237|238}}Kerouac published his first novel one year after Mailer his—we may turn to the prospect of literary similarity and the makings of cultural and countercultural depth without referring to complex theoretical strategies that would make their core ideas seem radically and racially different.

The character identities, memories, and dislocative dreaming of ''The Naked and the Dead'' positively anticipates the legend of beatnik discovery and adventure; further, the stress in this novel is upon humanity, identity, and emotional attachment in a no man’s land of carnage and alienation. Mailer and Kerouac both address the spiritual decimation of the modern American. They call attention to the semiotic parameters of exile and self-diminution against the glowing possibility of “Pax Americana.” Both authors tread heavily on the same psychic/cultural ground: they match the tactility and emotional happinesses of humanity against the spectacle of a debilitating nightmare of a powerful abyss. Both authors struggle to match the inhumanity, moreover, of external or “foreign” cultures against the certainty of an American imagination of selfhood. Without approaching the emotional dread for what Jean-François Lyotard termed in postmodern literature the continuous revolution of forms, {{sfn|Lyotard|1984|p=10}} Mailer spindles dream, memory, and emotional renditions of faith against the hungering stresses of democracy and camaraderie in a dangerous military no-man’s land, passively anticipating a coming “New Era” that assembles memory against the threat of totalitarian mind-control. In many instances, very real tensions and hierarchical dimensions are muted so as to receive the delicious individuation and democratizing touch of pre-War dreaming: we are led to the confirmation of a deeply pensive American subject anxiously wandering through the intellectual transformation of his world. More succinctly, though, Mailer parallels Kerouacian impulses to inscribe emotions—love, the body, rusticity, and tactility as the architectonic of democratic “spirit.” We are ritualized subjects who imbibe in the indistinct and unpredictable mem-oirs of an older America that exuded a dramatic moment of self-satisfaction and refinement in its making of political theory. Fighting the inhuman standardizations of “post”-ness, too, is a valiant literary assemblage of facts and self-delineation. The American man’s sensoryness is the backdrop to his liberated self, his quest for personal redemption in a utopic world symbolizing his ethos borrowed from American community. Mark Cirino writes the following:
{{pg|238|239}}<blockquote>Fitzgerald and others have misconstrued aspects of Hemingway’s objectives, which Mailer grasped intuitively and intellectually. The central thrust to Hemingway’s literary project was to dramatize the compromised functioning of thought as the modern consciousness is incorporated into the violent activities of the twentieth-century man of action... (Hemingway) is disclosing the tension that defines his work, the internal struggle between a man of action and a man of thought.{{sfn|Cirino|2010|p=126}}</blockquote>
Yet the soldier’s reflection, or rather the peculiar moment of that reflection on one’s past, is what produces mankind’s idea of community, ethicality, and beauty. Notwithstanding the tremendous filmic possibilities of a quasi-pastoralist moment of reflection, “beatnik” accelerates the possibilities for an expanded romanticism: it draws memory, dream, and conversation against the tide of oppression, while Americanizing an anti-rational moment of cultural topos. Vulgarizing self-portrayals, moreover, project Sampas’s thematic idea of a “crude, raw, unfinished—superb” American being: more important, though, is the depth of similarity in terms of modern man’s cultural realization of himself.{{sfn|Kerouac|1996|p=69}} While modernism, akin to William Faulkner’s writing of internal memory in ''The Sound and the Fury'', is textualized through the narrative moment of confinement to the island of Anopopei, a pressingly beatnik sentiment is shared among a multi-ethnic troop which is bemusing the collective impact of humanity in the modern ''ethos'', painted in terms concrete, sensory, and lingual.

Scenes of romantic sensualism, as was common to Kerouac and certainly a major tour de force in Kerouac’s first novel, ''The Town And The City'', confirm the poeticity of American man’s modern journey to validate democracy and democratization. They also stage modern American man’s much-anticipated confrontation of undemocratic “post” officialism and conservatism. We could, of course, understand the kind of cultural-political battling between the two men when we read statements like these:
<div class="center" style="width: auto; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;">

'''POLACK''': (falsetto voice) I don’t know why I’m not more popular with the girls . . . I’m such an easy lay. (They all laugh.)

'''BROWN''': What do you think your girl friend is doing now? I’ll tell you what. It’s just about six A.M. now in America. She’s wakin’ up in bed with a guy who can give her just as much as you</div>

{{pg|239|240}}<div class="center" style="width: auto; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;">can, and she’s giving him the same goddam line she handed you. I tell you, Minetta, there ain’t a one of them you can trust. They’ll all cheat on you.

'''POLACK''': There ain’t a fuggin woman is any good.

'''MINETTA''': (weakly) Well, I ain’t worrying.

'''STANLEY''': It’s different with me. I got a kid.
'''BROWN''': The ones with kids are the worst. They’re the ones who’re bored and really need a good time. There ain’t a woman is worth a goddam.{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=185-186}}</div>

Of course, soldiers musing about their wives’ cheating habits restates the basic antagonism, both political and physical, between Mailer and Kerouac. One is out on the battlefield, away from the pleasures of life, perhaps stiffening his resolve and making him less likely to be lenient about social policy, while the other is mostly at home, free to expostulate the labyrinthine and otherwise juicy moments of pleasurable transcendence from the ordinary. Sexual jealousy, or “fighting for cunts,” probably influenced the medium of writing as much as it symbolized modern man’s quest for self-realization. It also deliciously problematizes Sampas’s statement of a “crude, raw, unfinished—superb” meta-modern man developing in the American context. While Mailer’s dramatization of romantic and sexual anxiety in ''The Naked And The Dead'' interrupts the syntactic form of being where Kerouac is free to propound and expostulate an ebullient and geographically diverse rebellion, Mailer’s account more dramatically stages the crises of modern American maleness, registering it as a psychic challenge to bring forth ethical and cultural vision in a changing world. Chapters exhuming memories of life before the war, entitled “The Time Machine,” represent a deeper sensual underpinning to the making of modern American selfhood and calculates the weight of modernist anxieties against the resilience of man’s spirit—economy, sexuality, faith, imagination, travel, education and psychology arrange the depth of modernist literary innovation and modern man’s social panic within the form of American male character. They restate the anxiety and possibility of man’s grasp of the “new” world without determining the ultimate course of action. That at least could predate Kerouac’s childhood memoirs in ''The Town And The City'': restating un-patriotic or hyper-patriotic moments of jingoism and hereticism predated the ro- {{pg|240|241}}mantic emphasis upon discovery, while nestling it in a crux of modern ultimacy that is inescapable rather than pleasantly redrawable.

In this segment, I compare and contrast three of the “Time Machine” chapters, which are Red Valsen, The Wandering Ministrel; Robert Hearn, The Addled Womb; and Joey Goldstein, The Cove of Brooklyn. In all three, the anxiety of being is coupled with the anticipation and imperfectness of man’s knowledge of a changing world that presents a new, challenging dynamic of political ideation and capitalist-cultural-metatechnologies that outmanuver the will and action of the American male self. The contrast between depressive novels such as William Faulkner’s ''The Sound And The Fury'', where a Harvard student commits suicide, and later modernisms such as Ernest Hemingway’s ''The Old Man And The Sea'', where an old fishermen doffs the outside world to restate his greatest quest within nature, mean to belabor the moment of modern anxiety in the development and redevelopment of self. Mailer’s soldiers are less emasculated than Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s ''Ulysses'' or Walter Mitty in the stories of James Thurber, but whether gay, roguish, or ethnic, they internalize the languages and imaginations of a newly cast modern world that tends to erase the ebullient masculine pastoralism of works such as Sherwood Anderson’s ''Winesburg, Ohio'' that molded a conception of modern man’s achievement through work, capitalism, education, and cultural longevity and maturity. Thus, the throbbing moment of self-doubt is captured against the spectacle of a powerful mass cultural redevelopment. It could be said that Mailer had thought through modern man’s special list of psychic and personal issues before Kerouac was to relocate them to physically and sensually liberating fantasy. American modernist novels, whether crammed with political news developments or littered with unlikely-sounding advertisements, elongate the spectacle of modern life and its circumstances—broadening, then, long-standing conceptions of American character and spirit rooted in premodern scripturalism and economic ingenuity, which must re-invent themselves as monumental counterweights to the infinite and coercive determinants of modern political realism. In the balance was a seemingly intractable American lingual, psychic, and cultural selfhood that was likely to tune out political ideas and even suppress them. Indeed, American notions of the outside world were far from objective and certain to overlook or misrepresent politically active beliefs and ideals as contrary to democracy and pluralism.

“The Wandering Ministrel” snapshots moments of Kerouacian rusticism {{pg|241|242}}and junked-out splendor. At reflective moments, the story of a coal-miner’s son facing the economic depression of his land falls into hoboed moments of brilliance long before Kerouac narrated them into the story of Cody Pomeray, in ''Visions of Cody'': “To a kid from a mining town, getting drunk in a flatcar on Saturday night is still fun. The horizon extends for a million miles over the silver cornfields.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=226}} Sensualism also accompanies education, employment, and sexuality without dismissing or diminishing the emotions and conversations around social responsibility: “The Wandering Ministrel” finds Red facing as a youth the problems of economic depression and ethnocentric distaste for new generations of Americans from European and Euro-Jewish stock. “Sensualism” also renders the proliferation of technology in a spirit more dense and spiritualizing than that of Kerouac. Rather than technology being inferior to or less lyrically promotive than the cultural, natural, and ecstatic, technology chronologizes modern man’s social and intellectual development and mediates in a spirit friendly with American male rhetoric and personality:
<blockquote>In ‘thirty-five he works in a restaurant for almost a year, the best dishwasher they ever had. (The rush hour lasts from twelve to three at that end of the kitchen. The dishes come clanking down the dumbwaiter, and the tray man mops the food and grease with his hand, fingers the lipstick on the glasses to loosen it, and drops them in a rack. In the machine, the steam vibrates and sings, whips out at the other end, where the finish man pulls out the tray with tongs, and wiggles the plates with his fingertips as he flips them on a pile. You don’t grab it with your bare hand, Jack.){{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=228}}</blockquote>
The thrill of sex, moreover, stages the economic and social anxieties of the post-World War II American rather than embolden a non-economic mobilization of transcendence, thereby equating the sensual with the realistic. We should remember that Kerouac’s motivations to render poetic and timeless the ecstatic or otherwise extra-normal pleasures and escapes of his generation rose from a materialistic spirit of confidence that permitted the ambitious re-drawing of the modern American experience. The staging of marital, sexual, and familial decline answers the tide of modern freedoms, both intellectual and sensual:
{{pg|242|243}}<poem style="margin-left:2em; float:left;">
You know, I’ll tell ya something, I don’t believe in God.
::You don’t mean that, Red!
::(Underneath the blanket his father’s body had been crushed
almost flat.) Yeah, that’s right, I just don’t believe in God.
::Sometimes I don’t either, Agnes says.
::Yeah, I can talk to you, ''you'' understand.
::Only you want to go away.
::Well. (There is the other knowledge. Her body is young and
strong and he knows the smell of her breasts, which are like powdered infant-flesh, but all the women turn to cordwood in the town.) You take that guy Joe Mackey who got Alice with a kid and left her, my own sister, but I tell ya I don’t blame him. You got to see that, Agnes.
::You’re cruel.
::Yeah, that’s right. It’s praise to the eighteen-year-old.{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=224}}</poem>

“The Addled Womb” counter-creates “beatnik” to locate anxiety and doubt rather than aggressive countercultural critique. We may even hypothesize the envisioning of a deeper and more centrist rendition of poet Allen Ginsberg, a confirmed homosexual who rigorously and polemically applied Marxist critique to the military-industrial complex. The opening stanzas in- scribe the power and magnificence of mid-century America in terms of civilizational ''topos'': “No one ever really comprehends it, the vast table of America,”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=328}} but the substitution of modern man’s nihilism instead of his faith and redemptive feelings counter-strategizes “beatnik” by proposing establishment and authority to inhere a classic moment of self-introspection, with layers of beneficence and destruction that rhetorically present tenacity rather than re-invention: “How do you conceive your own death, your own unimportance in all that man-created immensity, through all the marble vaults and brick ridges and the furnaces that lead to the market place? You always believe somehow that the world will end with your death. It is all more intense, more violent, more rutted than life anywhere else.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=328}}

True, the discordant gauging of Hearn between destruction, or conscious realization of destruction, and the gleeful portrait of the vices and pleasures of capitalist making, “AN AIRLINE TICKET TO ROMANTIC PLACES, and the touch and smell of young girls, lipstick odor, powder odor, and the svelte lean scent of leather on the seats of convertibles,”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=334}} challenges the psy- {{pg|243|244}}chic and spiritual re-invention of American selfhood through the lens of “beatniks” seeking instead occultism and ethnolingualisms that could, too, render the modern psyche more tenacious and redemptive. Ruggedness of personality performs the rejection of anti-capitalist calls to “revolution” while inviting Kerouacian masculinity: “For a little while it is all quite glorious. They are wise and aware and sick and the world outside is corrupt and they are the only ones who know it.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=340}} Yet the inclusion of communist pretenders such as Jansen, or even his presentation of Oswald Spengler commenting on “an acquisitive society,”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=340}} gives us a dialectic that Kerouac and Ginsberg craved and continually re-wrote to express increasing knowledge of what was “beyond” the American mainstream, or even military-industrial complex. Hearn’s recurrent meditations on topos, technology, and rebellion anticipates the multicultural and multi-lifestyle possibilities for a new-fangled democracy with a much greater comprehension of the world. Into this, we may draw the soldiers at Anopopei and the freaks of Greenwich Village as mutual selves: the idea or façade of negotiation and communication is archetypally drawn as a struggle for ideological realization.

Interestingly enough, the strongest instance of romantic/sensual redemption through romantic love is the province of a Jewish soldier, Joey Goldstein. “The Cove of Brooklyn” stages achievement and knowledge, and the monetary realization of that knowledge, against stereotypes and depressive urban characteristics that perform ethnic and racial subjugation; in the context of ''The Naked and the Dead'', we may easily devise cultural and sensual rejuvenation as a mode of being and a learning of selfhood in an American social fabric ruled by racialism and racial denigration. Sexual anxiety and the emotional depth of romantic encounters were common to the writing of Jewish-American writers—from Bernard Malamud’s ''The Assistant'' to Isaac Bashevis Singer’s ambitious medieval fairy-tale ''The Slave'', we might underscore a redemptive theme to sexual lust as a being-creating metaphor that offsets both the severeness of Judaic religious conservatism and the constant tension between Jews and Christians who either envy them or wish to violently quell their religious difference. Goldstein happens through a characteristic tale of urban nurturing and economic self-realization. He falls in love and marries, then has a family. Social liminality is re-written optimistically and within a spirit of masculine confidence: “Shy sensitive girls may end up as poetesses or they may turn bitter and drink alone in bars, but nice shy sensitive Jewish girls usually marry and have children, gain two pounds {{pg|244|245}}a year, and worry more about refurbishing hats and trying a new casserole than about the meaning of life.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=487}} It was, of course, a classically beatnik ''ouevre'' to try and write the romantic and erotic generativity of the non- White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant man or woman, but Beat Generation novels and poems were less adept at recognizing the economic and social “success,” by mainstream terms: the covert brilliance of “the Other” was carefully guarded, a kind of secret that had evocative psychological power. Goldstein’s relationship with Natalie, and specifically the romantic death of that relationship during the maternity of the second child, projects a very different positioning of “the ethnic.” His/her social and cultural success, rather than promoting multi-ethnic ecstasies, strengthens ethnic traditions while focusing a point of modern, urban social maturity:
<blockquote>They expand, put on weight, and give money to charitable organizations to help refugees. They are sincere and friendly and happy, and nearly everyone likes them. As their son grows older, begins to talk, there are any number of pleasures they draw from him. They are content and the habits of marriage lap about them like a warm bath. They never feel great joy but they are rarely depressed, and nothing immediate is ever excessive or cruel. {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=491}}</blockquote>
Jack Kerouac does not narrate the ethnic citizen’s realization of community and success until 1965 with the publication of ''Desolation Angels''. Mailer’s centrism, by contrast, envisions the spectacle of “beatnik” as a kind of temptation, an allure, to a spiritual outcome that is uncalculated and therefore misleading. Presenting the “Jewish” story, of course, overlooks very real gaps of cross-cultural understanding that Mailer deliberately puts in his soldiers: the positive xenophobia, plus the distortions of non-Western peoples such as the Japanese, again seriously distort any kind of populist or democratic ideal for a “Pax Americana.” Mailer’s penning of Goldstein diminishes the demographic and geographic concept of “the Other,” while retaining him as a modern subject borne of the fruit of social pluralism. Although the scope of otherness is limited, again a counter-thrust to beatnik eclecticism is given a very positive bearing, one which competes with narrated racisms to the present day.

We should remember that Mailer was a writer who faced the same crisis as the Beat Generation: that of publishing to earn a living. Still, Aronowitz’s {{pg|245|246}}essay underscores what we are often likely to dismiss—that their coinciding in the early 1940s breathed a kind of social estimation of American community and overall outlook. The harsh criticism, too, of “The White Negro,” although a key theme of Mailer’s recurrent centrism, veils a moment of social being that is the continuing effort and development of authorial translations of culture. Paraphrasing Oswald Spengler—for many critics the godfather of “Beat”—he establishes the continuity of literature instead of its schizophrenic and hasty re-drawing of consciousness and experience to suit political needs. In short, Mailer’s anticipation of the Beat Generation sustained a continuing moment of literary discovery: we find a delicious sort of foil that forecasts the problem and the praxis of modern American man’s social achievement.

===Citations===
{{reflist|20em}}

===Works Cited===
{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}
* {{cite book |last=Anderson |first=Sherwood |date=2005 |title=Winesburg, Ohio |location= New York|publisher=Signet |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Aronowitz |first=Alfred G. |date=18 May 1960 |title=Rev. of ''The Beats'', by Seymour Krim |work=The Village Voice |pages=1+ |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Chandarlapaty |first=Raj |date=2009 |title=The Beat Generation and Counterculture: Paul Bowles, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac |location=New York |publisher=Peter Lang |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Cirino |first=Mark |title=Norman Mailer’s ''The Fight'': Hemingway, Bullfighting, and the Lovely Metaphysics of Boxing |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=123-138 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Faulkner |first=William |date=1993 |title=The Sound and the Fury |editor-last1=Minter |editor-first1=David |location=New York |publisher=W.W.Norton |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1996 |title=The Old Man and The Sea |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Joyce |first=James |date=2011 |title=Ulysses |location=Oxford |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Kerouac |first=Jack |date=1996 |title=Selected Letters 1940–1956 |editor-last1=Charters |editor-first1=Ann |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Kerouac |first=Jack |authormask=1 |date=1948 |title=The Town and The City |location=New York |publisher=Harcourt Brace & Co |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Kerouac |first=Jack |authormask=1 |date=1972 |title=Visions of Cody |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lyotard |first=Jean-François |date=1984 |title=The Postmodern Condition |location=Minneapolis |publisher=U of Minnesota P |ref=harv }}
* {{cite letter |first=Norman |last=Mailer |subject= Letter to Michael McClure |date=17 February 1964 |location=University of Texas-Austin |publisher=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1959 |title= “The White Negro.” Advertisements for Myself |location=New York |publisher=G.P. Putnam’s Sons |pages=337-58 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Malamud |first=Bernard |date=1958 |title=The Assistant |location=New York |publisher=Signet |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=McClure |first=Michael |date=1969 |title=Ghost Tantras |location=San Francisco |publisher=Four Seasons Foundation |ref=harv }}
* {{cite letter |last=McClure |first=Michael |authormask=1 |subject= Letter to Norman Mailer |date=Feb 1964 |location=University of Texas-Austin |publisher=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=McClure |first=Michael |authormask=1 |date=1970 |title=Mad Cub |location=New York |publisher=Bantam |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |date=1992 |chapter=Naked Lunch on Trial |title=Naked Lunch. By William S. Burroughs |location=New York |publisher=Grove Press |pages=IX-XXXIV |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Singer |first=Isaac Bashevis |date=1988 |title=The Slave |location=New York |publisher=Farrar, Straus and Giroux |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Thurber |first=James |date=2000 |title=The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and Other Pieces |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |ref=harv }}

{{Review|state=expanded}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Through the Lens of the Beatniks: Norman Mailer and Modern American Man’s Quest for Self-Realization}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Through the Lens of the Beatniks: Norman Mailer and Modern American Man’s Quest for Self-Realization

2025-04-13T21:53:12Z

Maggiemrogers: addition of citations and works cited

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{{Byline|last=Chandarlapaty|first=Raj|abstract=An analysis of the relationship, similarities, and cultural connections between Mailer and the major Beat writers. |note=My thanks to the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin for permission to examine the Norman Mailer archives in researching this essay.}}
{{dc|dc=F|ew mid-century writers were friendly}} with the Beat Generation. Most, including Norman Mailer, cited their criminal and licentious impulses as an undermining tangling of ethically strong American sensibilities. I have noted Mailer’s criticism found in “The White Negro,” where Mailer sketched the unkempt and ghettoized portrait of white rebels such as Neal Cassady. Whether it is Mailer, Arthur Miller, or left poet-rockers such as Bob Dylan, or even fiction writers such as Truman Capote, the recurring message of a degenerated gang of would-be hoodlums abandoning mainstream lifestyles remained a cynical counter-step to the endless innovations and cultural adventurism that was unheard of for most Americans in the 1950s.

I realized that I had visited the literary spectacle of Norman Mailer but a few times: once, as a child, when ''The Executioner’s Song'' aired on ABC in 1980, and then, in 2007 when Mailer died at the age of 84. While a graduate student, I thought that he was compared unfavorably to Capote, with Mailer a kind of “copier,” an imitator of Capote’s much more virtuous meditation on crime and human psychology. The essays were very much in Capote’s favor. While reading ''The Naked and the Dead'', I began to understand something wholly detached from the occult glory, fame, and entertainer-super- star-politician thread that Mailer is famous for colonizing: Mailer was definitely interested in narrating the cerebration of modern man’s social and civic problems, and perhaps the direct challenge to American humankind’s {{pg|231|232}}democratic spirit when faced with the powerful and nature-deciding apparatus of institutions and authoritarianism. He writes the following of “The League of Omnipotent Men”:
<blockquote>You could kill the dozen men, and there would be another dozen to replace them, and another and another. Out of all the vast pressures and crosscurrents of history was evolving the archetype of twentieth-century man. The ''particular'' man who would direct it, make certain that “the natural role ...was anxiety.” The techniques had outraced the psyche. “The majority of men must be subservient to the machine and it’s not a business they instinctively enjoy.” And in the marginal area, the gap, were the peculiar tensions that birthed the dream. (''The Naked and the Dead'' 391)</blockquote>
As a whole, ''The Naked and the Dead'' snapshots very familiar wartime ground—the ethnic and racial jokes, the longing for sexuality and the thrust of jealousy, the protected incomprehension of foreign cultures that impaled American democracy with the very real contention that American mankind was simply not humanly prepared to lead the world at all. There is much more: first, this novel captures American manhood’s very real and gnawing psychic doubts and missteps, while dreamily transposing the economic and tactile miracle of long-standing American prosperity. Second, tactility is established in the above passage akin to the sentiments of Jack Kerouac—that in a modern world, we should lose our animate confidence, pride, and basically our intellectual ability to manage the fruit of both changing times and world responsibility. What I intend to depict in this essay, then, is Mailer’s increasing, if guarded, approval for some of the character and ethnographic foci of Beat writers. The letters and testimonies gathered from Harry Ransom Center overstate the anxiety, terror, and illuminating potential of the far-reaching hand of the new generation of literary bohemians, and therefore Mailer’s recognition that both democracy and culture would be in some way transformed by this shaded lens of cultural hereticism.

A remarkable exchange of letters between Mailer and Beat poet Michael McClure renders the flat authoritarianism of “The White Negro” as questionable, dialectic, and even chronologically false: Mailer’s letters to McClure certainly weigh in an approval of the occult ethnographies and mythologi-
{{pg|232|233}}cal wizardry of the Beat writers. Much of McClure’s correspondence date to 1964, and show an anxious McClure trying to publish a novel and some short manuscripts including “Untitled Novel,” “Ghost Tantras,” and “Mad Cub.” The letters from McClure, far in excess of what Mailer writes back—reflect a proselytizing tone, an aggressive eagerness to suggest beatnik ideas in the post-Beat era. One such letter, dated from February 1964, includes his rendition of the beatnik “legend” of writing mythology. What also becomes clear from this letter is McClure’s admiration of Mailer: he is close to idolizing Mailer as a literary godfather who can help him with his publishing fiction and poetry attests to a very different social and intellectual imagination than the curt criticisms found in “The White Negro.” Letters from Mailer are comparatively short, even handwritten. Letters from McClure are voluminous and copious in number. Mankind’s subconscious motivations, too, are an important theme in Mailer’s most acclaimed novels. What is less known was his appreciation of the mythological and anthropological adventuring of the Beats, and the impact of narco-criticism that could identify a very different dynamic to the motions of the psychic organism through drugs. Of course, we should be cognizant of the fact that the literary conventions of 1964 were very different from those of 1957. Clearly, however, Mailer is moved by the literary possibilities for conscious expansion and occult mythologies as they might derive or enhance American spirit.

On February 17, 1964, Mailer responded and expressed the visible tension between refinement and animate penning of self- and world-mythology that through the portrait of the writer gives credence to the art of discovery and self-promotion through writing. Mailer’s cautionary disdain is matched with an approval of the writing scene and the promotion of art and culture through writing, rather than an overstatement of the dilemmas of social realism. While far from a complete reversal of opinions and criticism in “The White Negro,” the anxiety of mentorship is given new impetus because of the cultural gap between the conservative-leaning 1950s and the explosive, global, revolutionary 1960s. Mailer projects an educated responsibility. He tacitly admits the relevance of liberalism and occultism in a less homogenous world, and coincides with some of the possibilities for excavating a modern epistemology against the tides of materialism and authoritarianism. “Flesh of the form” directly translates Sampas’s 1942 letter to Kerouac as that of authorial progeny—what could be said about the modern development of American manhood could be as easily said about the influence of writing {{pg|233|234}}on one’s imagination, and suggests a maybe-ambivalent directioning of the Beatnik social and intellectual “possibility” (Kerouac, ''Selected''). Egoistic granting of cultural status through writing modifies considerably the art of social revolution. What is clear is that Mailer recognizes in the Beat Generation a potential that was completely rejected by him at the embryonic time when the Beats were completely unrecognized and unpublished, not a factor at all in the making of ideas on the political world stage. That Mailer recognizes something going on that is subtle yet dramatically impactive borrows directly from his assuming tutelage to an ever-growing population of renegades—he has incorporated the concept of “beatnik” into his idea of the modern selfhood through the mask of writing itself. Mailer’s passion for the ego-soul and for the imaging and fame of American consciousness is here greatly altered and suggestive of a very new stage of development for him.

Mailer’s fairly paternal tone is contrastive with the general disapproval of publishers for “renegade” literatures that praise rebellion, animate power, and the ecstatic. We should, of course, remember that publishers denied Kerouac his attainment of literary glory for twelve years—and that most Beat novels and poetry were shunned or bowdlerized by editorial interpretations designed to protect doctrines of American conservatism. In the genesis of “Flower Power” and hippiedom, replete with animate, environmental, and occult glories, many literary greats presided over a degenerated bunch of would-be writers with no true talent. Paul Bowles’s Itesa apartment in Tangier was a classic example of the engine of failure when it came to collaborative re-invention of the modernist form, with many writers appearing at his apartment in a scheme of literary disfocus and psychic abandonment unreconcilable with the business of true literary production. We could even make much of the excursion of hipsters and hippies to remote regions of the world. That literary genius involved far-off travel implies the unsaleable quality of these ideas and the weakness and embryonic passiveness of those truly “fighting” the establishment and the military-industrial complex. The subject matter for McClure’s letters includes digests of ''Mad Cub'' and ''Ghost Tantras''. Both are tributes to primal, essential, animate reclamation of instinct and poetic animateness. Written in the early 1960s, they restate Sampas’s letter and the debacle between officialism and animate ownership of the psyche, the earth, and primordial consciousness. It is suggestible, of course, that Mailer saw enough self-characteristics in these narrations, but the pop-
{{pg|234|235}}ular message is clear enough. By 1964, Mailer saw in McClure what he would deny of Kerouac. He understood that “Beat” or “beatnik” inveighed a general sense of the development of modern Western man, and could not as easily confine the Beat literary works to a colonial scheming of its characters and ideas. That the “last” meeting of the Beat Generation takes place in 1964 in San Francisco heralds a “new” beginning, one in which literary production could be divorced from its older mentors and hence some of the political idealism that informed them. Mailer, by being paternalistic and circumspect, divines the prospect of literary acquisition as a developable strand of his own literary genius, and a recalculation of literary possibility to influence culture and therefore move forward the architectonic of American selfhood in the Modern Era. Mailer’s tone, in the letters, shows moments of warmth, authorial reciprocity in communications, and the lingering anxiety of publishing and its expectations from the writer. A shared anxiety is continuously documented in lieu of the 1964 political elections in the US.

Mailer was also commissioned by Allen Ginsberg and other Beat writers to testify against the censoring of Burroughs’s novel, ''Naked Lunch'', which was finally cleared of American censorship in 1966. Mailer testified that
<blockquote>We are richer for [Burroughs’s] record; and we are more impressive as a nation because a publisher can print that record and sell it in an open bookstore, sell it legally. It even offers a hint that the “Great Society,” which Lyndon Johnson speaks of, may not be merely a politician’s high wind, but indeed may have the hard seed of a new truth; for no ordinary society could have the bravery and moral honesty to stare down into the abyss of ''Naked Lunch''. But a Great Society can look into the chasm of its own potential Hell and recognize that it is stronger as a nation for possessing an artist who can come back from Hell with a portrait of its dimensions. (“''Naked''” XVII–XIX)</blockquote>
Mailer’s message here is very obvious—as a nation and as a “collective soul,” America and its conception of democracy are expanded and strengthened by the existence of drug-addicted literary genius. The phrasing of “dimensions of Hell” repeats the doctrine of American “learning” rather than the diminution, comedism, and nihilism of surrealist writers who also used drugs. We almost feel that Mailer believes that taking drugs is a step towards {{pg|235|236}}totalistic self-redemption and even cultural-historical redemption, an answering of the seemingly meaningless and jocular decay of the earlier beatniks who praised Black and other minorities for spawning the adulation of excess. Yet there is also an authorial recognition of grandeur and achievement: Burroughs may easily be mismatched against the United States Government in the sense that Burroughs’s written and social understandings of drugs, consciousness, addiction, and “culture” was far greater and considerably more objective and human. It is also very likely that Mailer saw reasons to praise Burroughs where he would have been reluctant to do so for Kerouac, that he recognized a gutsier and more cerebrated authorship and the promise of a more durable idealism. Surely, in the early part of the Twentieth Century, man’s understanding of narcotics was far from literary. Once again, the literary medium is a common ground, a moment of psychosocial development away from colonial or “Jim Crow” barbarizations meant to racialize and therefore diminish the true impact of suffering and intoxication upon the modern self. There is also an implied note of recognition of the changes in popular culture. Mailer’s comparatively centrist ''metier'' develops a much broader social understanding of drugs and their arguable utility in a rapidly changing world. Gone are the fantasies and undefined adventures that meshed with Victorian portraits of horror, and ushered in is a definable modern subject that is ''a part of'' the modern reality, lingual and otherwise. Mailer attempts this without giving any credence to occult or multicultural possibilities for experience: he is soberly realistic and attempts to incorporate a divergent stream of texts and their signification into the mainstream setting. Mailer’s typing of Burroughs as a “religious” writer maintains some of the traditional mask. However, he concurs with the portrait of a profound if terrifying reflection on the mind and its lingual construction of experience. His identifying religion and damnation give credence to the contemporary concept of drugs and rehabilitation, while escaping them by stressing “the real” and its influence on the modern society. The impulse to democratization, or rather a recognition of the form and humanity of drug-addicted experience, projects without much reservation the idea of a maturing spirit that is older, wiser, and with a greater grasp of psychic agency. Authoritarian dogma, then, is not refuted but rather channeled into a more intimate discussion, one favorable to the individual and to social freedoms. Although Mailer is not a strong proponent of the legalization of drugs, he certainly recognizes that writing about drugs contributed {{pg|236|237}}to a greater understanding, and maybe even the redemption, of man from his long-standing social and personal ills.

'''LITERARY COMPARISONS:'''

'''THE PROSPECT OF LITERARY GENIUS IN MODERN AMERICA, AND THE ESTIMATION OF MODERN CHARACTER'''

Whatever may be said about Mailer’s strong points of criticism in “The White Negro,” which was published the same year as ''On The Road'', Mailer’s publication of ''The Village Voice'' from the 1960s attests to his modifying presence, and even the expansion of “beatnik” into other areas of modern consciousness and social learning. A particularly interesting point of introduction came from Al Aronowitz’s May 18, 1960 column in ''The Village Voice'':
<blockquote>But actually Kerouac and Mailer have long been literary brothers, even if under each other’s skin. Which one founded the Beat Generation and which one merely found it is just a matter of semantics.... Perhaps it might be concluded that, in one way, Mailer found in his own mind what Kerouac found throughout America.</blockquote>
If the comparisons are misleading, they at least call to attention how both authors captured modern man’s impalement with both the outside world and with memory: the decidedly different paths to literary glory that are encapsulated in a comparison between “America” and “the mind” makes literary comparisons between the two men more problematic—that Mailer could be interpreted as mentalizing the anxiety of “beatnik” legend suggests a parallel writing of selfhood from external and internal experiences. The statement of literary co-writing could not be biographically more certain: both men served in the war, and forecasted their discoveries onto a new-fangled American who belonged as much to the world as to his particular region. Therefore, an exposition of literary and character similarities proposes a considerably greater selfhood and the alterity of the lens. Reading Mailer through the literary and character conventions of Kerouac deepens the anxiety and soul-redemptions of Spengler’s primary statement of civilizational “decline,” and maybe the impetus towards a rejuvenated social learning. Since the publication career of Mailer and Kerouac is very close in origin— {{pg|237|238}}Kerouac published his first novel one year after Mailer his—we may turn to the prospect of literary similarity and the makings of cultural and countercultural depth without referring to complex theoretical strategies that would make their core ideas seem radically and racially different.

The character identities, memories, and dislocative dreaming of ''The Naked and the Dead'' positively anticipates the legend of beatnik discovery and adventure; further, the stress in this novel is upon humanity, identity, and emotional attachment in a no man’s land of carnage and alienation. Mailer and Kerouac both address the spiritual decimation of the modern American. They call attention to the semiotic parameters of exile and self-diminution against the glowing possibility of “Pax Americana.” Both authors tread heavily on the same psychic/cultural ground: they match the tactility and emotional happinesses of humanity against the spectacle of a debilitating nightmare of a powerful abyss. Both authors struggle to match the inhumanity, moreover, of external or “foreign” cultures against the certainty of an American imagination of selfhood. Without approaching the emotional dread for what Jean-François Lyotard termed in postmodern literature the continuous revolution of forms (10), Mailer spindles dream, memory, and emotional renditions of faith against the hungering stresses of democracy and camaraderie in a dangerous military no-man’s land, passively anticipating a coming “New Era” that assembles memory against the threat of totalitarian mind-control. In many instances, very real tensions and hierarchical dimensions are muted so as to receive the delicious individuation and democratizing touch of pre-War dreaming: we are led to the confirmation of a deeply pensive American subject anxiously wandering through the intellectual transformation of his world. More succinctly, though, Mailer parallels Kerouacian impulses to inscribe emotions—love, the body, rusticity, and tactility as the architectonic of democratic “spirit.” We are ritualized subjects who imbibe in the indistinct and unpredictable mem-oirs of an older America that exuded a dramatic moment of self-satisfaction and refinement in its making of political theory. Fighting the inhuman standardizations of “post”-ness, too, is a valiant literary assemblage of facts and self-delineation. The American man’s sensoryness is the backdrop to his liberated self, his quest for personal redemption in a utopic world symbolizing his ethos borrowed from American community. Mark Cirino writes the following:
{{pg|238|239}}<blockquote>Fitzgerald and others have misconstrued aspects of Hemingway’s objectives, which Mailer grasped intuitively and intellectually. The central thrust to Hemingway’s literary project was to dramatize the compromised functioning of thought as the modern consciousness is incorporated into the violent activities of the twentieth-century man of action... (Hemingway) is disclosing the tension that defines his work, the internal struggle between a man of action and a man of thought. (126)</blockquote>
Yet the soldier’s reflection, or rather the peculiar moment of that reflection on one’s past, is what produces mankind’s idea of community, ethicality, and beauty. Notwithstanding the tremendous filmic possibilities of a quasi-pastoralist moment of reflection, “beatnik” accelerates the possibilities for an expanded romanticism: it draws memory, dream, and conversation against the tide of oppression, while Americanizing an anti-rational moment of cultural topos. Vulgarizing self-portrayals, moreover, project Sampas’s thematic idea of a “crude, raw, unfinished—superb” American being: more important, though, is the depth of similarity in terms of modern man’s cultural realization of himself (Kerouac, ''Selected'' 69). While modernism, akin to William Faulkner’s writing of internal memory in ''The Sound and the Fury'', is textualized through the narrative moment of confinement to the island of Anopopei, a pressingly beatnik sentiment is shared among a multi-ethnic troop which is bemusing the collective impact of humanity in the modern ''ethos'', painted in terms concrete, sensory, and lingual.

Scenes of romantic sensualism, as was common to Kerouac and certainly a major tour de force in Kerouac’s first novel, ''The Town And The City'', confirm the poeticity of American man’s modern journey to validate democracy and democratization. They also stage modern American man’s much-anticipated confrontation of undemocratic “post” officialism and conservatism. We could, of course, understand the kind of cultural-political battling between the two men when we read statements like these:
<div class="center" style="width: auto; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;">

'''POLACK''': (falsetto voice) I don’t know why I’m not more popular with the girls . . . I’m such an easy lay. (They all laugh.)

'''BROWN''': What do you think your girl friend is doing now? I’ll tell you what. It’s just about six A.M. now in America. She’s wakin’ up in bed with a guy who can give her just as much as you</div>

{{pg|239|240}}<div class="center" style="width: auto; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;">can, and she’s giving him the same goddam line she handed you. I tell you, Minetta, there ain’t a one of them you can trust. They’ll all cheat on you.

'''POLACK''': There ain’t a fuggin woman is any good.

'''MINETTA''': (weakly) Well, I ain’t worrying.

'''STANLEY''': It’s different with me. I got a kid.
'''BROWN''': The ones with kids are the worst. They’re the ones who’re bored and really need a good time. There ain’t a woman is worth a goddam. (Mailer, ''Naked'' 185–186)</div>

Of course, soldiers musing about their wives’ cheating habits restates the basic antagonism, both political and physical, between Mailer and Kerouac. One is out on the battlefield, away from the pleasures of life, perhaps stiffening his resolve and making him less likely to be lenient about social policy, while the other is mostly at home, free to expostulate the labyrinthine and otherwise juicy moments of pleasurable transcendence from the ordinary. Sexual jealousy, or “fighting for cunts,” probably influenced the medium of writing as much as it symbolized modern man’s quest for self-realization. It also deliciously problematizes Sampas’s statement of a “crude, raw, unfinished—superb” meta-modern man developing in the American context. While Mailer’s dramatization of romantic and sexual anxiety in ''The Naked And The Dead'' interrupts the syntactic form of being where Kerouac is free to propound and expostulate an ebullient and geographically diverse rebellion, Mailer’s account more dramatically stages the crises of modern American maleness, registering it as a psychic challenge to bring forth ethical and cultural vision in a changing world. Chapters exhuming memories of life before the war, entitled “The Time Machine,” represent a deeper sensual underpinning to the making of modern American selfhood and calculates the weight of modernist anxieties against the resilience of man’s spirit—economy, sexuality, faith, imagination, travel, education and psychology arrange the depth of modernist literary innovation and modern man’s social panic within the form of American male character. They restate the anxiety and possibility of man’s grasp of the “new” world without determining the ultimate course of action. That at least could predate Kerouac’s childhood memoirs in ''The Town And The City'': restating un-patriotic or hyper-patriotic moments of jingoism and hereticism predated the ro- {{pg|240|241}}mantic emphasis upon discovery, while nestling it in a crux of modern ultimacy that is inescapable rather than pleasantly redrawable.

In this segment, I compare and contrast three of the “Time Machine” chapters, which are Red Valsen, The Wandering Ministrel; Robert Hearn, The Addled Womb; and Joey Goldstein, The Cove of Brooklyn. In all three, the anxiety of being is coupled with the anticipation and imperfectness of man’s knowledge of a changing world that presents a new, challenging dynamic of political ideation and capitalist-cultural-metatechnologies that outmanuver the will and action of the American male self. The contrast between depressive novels such as William Faulkner’s ''The Sound And The Fury'', where a Harvard student commits suicide, and later modernisms such as Ernest Hemingway’s ''The Old Man And The Sea'', where an old fishermen doffs the outside world to restate his greatest quest within nature, mean to belabor the moment of modern anxiety in the development and redevelopment of self. Mailer’s soldiers are less emasculated than Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s ''Ulysses'' or Walter Mitty in the stories of James Thurber, but whether gay, roguish, or ethnic, they internalize the languages and imaginations of a newly cast modern world that tends to erase the ebullient masculine pastoralism of works such as Sherwood Anderson’s ''Winesburg, Ohio'' that molded a conception of modern man’s achievement through work, capitalism, education, and cultural longevity and maturity. Thus, the throbbing moment of self-doubt is captured against the spectacle of a powerful mass cultural redevelopment. It could be said that Mailer had thought through modern man’s special list of psychic and personal issues before Kerouac was to relocate them to physically and sensually liberating fantasy. American modernist novels, whether crammed with political news developments or littered with unlikely-sounding advertisements, elongate the spectacle of modern life and its circumstances—broadening, then, long-standing conceptions of American character and spirit rooted in premodern scripturalism and economic ingenuity, which must re-invent themselves as monumental counterweights to the infinite and coercive determinants of modern political realism. In the balance was a seemingly intractable American lingual, psychic, and cultural selfhood that was likely to tune out political ideas and even suppress them. Indeed, American notions of the outside world were far from objective and certain to overlook or misrepresent politically active beliefs and ideals as contrary to democracy and pluralism.

“The Wandering Ministrel” snapshots moments of Kerouacian rusticism {{pg|241|242}}and junked-out splendor. At reflective moments, the story of a coal-miner’s son facing the economic depression of his land falls into hoboed moments of brilliance long before Kerouac narrated them into the story of Cody Pomeray, in ''Visions of Cody'': “To a kid from a mining town, getting drunk in a flatcar on Saturday night is still fun. The horizon extends for a million miles over the silver cornfields” (Mailer, ''Naked'' 226). Sensualism also accompanies education, employment, and sexuality without dismissing or diminishing the emotions and conversations around social responsibility: “The Wandering Ministrel” finds Red facing as a youth the problems of economic depression and ethnocentric distaste for new generations of Americans from European and Euro-Jewish stock. “Sensualism” also renders the proliferation of technology in a spirit more dense and spiritualizing than that of Kerouac. Rather than technology being inferior to or less lyrically promotive than the cultural, natural, and ecstatic, technology chronologizes modern man’s social and intellectual development and mediates in a spirit friendly with American male rhetoric and personality:
<blockquote>In ‘thirty-five he works in a restaurant for almost a year, the best dishwasher they ever had. (The rush hour lasts from twelve to three at that end of the kitchen. The dishes come clanking down the dumbwaiter, and the tray man mops the food and grease with his hand, fingers the lipstick on the glasses to loosen it, and drops them in a rack. In the machine, the steam vibrates and sings, whips out at the other end, where the finish man pulls out the tray with tongs, and wiggles the plates with his fingertips as he flips them on a pile. You don’t grab it with your bare hand, Jack.) (228)</blockquote>
The thrill of sex, moreover, stages the economic and social anxieties of the post-World War II American rather than embolden a non-economic mobilization of transcendence, thereby equating the sensual with the realistic. We should remember that Kerouac’s motivations to render poetic and timeless the ecstatic or otherwise extra-normal pleasures and escapes of his generation rose from a materialistic spirit of confidence that permitted the ambitious re-drawing of the modern American experience. The staging of marital, sexual, and familial decline answers the tide of modern freedoms, both intellectual and sensual:
{{pg|242|243}}<poem style="margin-left:2em; float:left;">
You know, I’ll tell ya something, I don’t believe in God.
::You don’t mean that, Red!
::(Underneath the blanket his father’s body had been crushed
almost flat.) Yeah, that’s right, I just don’t believe in God.
::Sometimes I don’t either, Agnes says.
::Yeah, I can talk to you, ''you'' understand.
::Only you want to go away.
::Well. (There is the other knowledge. Her body is young and
strong and he knows the smell of her breasts, which are like powdered infant-flesh, but all the women turn to cordwood in the town.) You take that guy Joe Mackey who got Alice with a kid and left her, my own sister, but I tell ya I don’t blame him. You got to see that, Agnes.
::You’re cruel.
::Yeah, that’s right. It’s praise to the eighteen-year-old. (224)</poem>

“The Addled Womb” counter-creates “beatnik” to locate anxiety and doubt rather than aggressive countercultural critique. We may even hypothesize the envisioning of a deeper and more centrist rendition of poet Allen Ginsberg, a confirmed homosexual who rigorously and polemically applied Marxist critique to the military-industrial complex. The opening stanzas in- scribe the power and magnificence of mid-century America in terms of civilizational ''topos'': “No one ever really comprehends it, the vast table of America” (328), but the substitution of modern man’s nihilism instead of his faith and redemptive feelings counter-strategizes “beatnik” by proposing establishment and authority to inhere a classic moment of self-introspection, with layers of beneficence and destruction that rhetorically present tenacity rather than re-invention: “How do you conceive your own death, your own unimportance in all that man-created immensity, through all the marble vaults and brick ridges and the furnaces that lead to the market place? You always believe somehow that the world will end with your death. It is all more intense, more violent, more rutted than life anywhere else” (328).

True, the discordant gauging of Hearn between destruction, or conscious realization of destruction, and the gleeful portrait of the vices and pleasures of capitalist making, “AN AIRLINE TICKET TO ROMANTIC PLACES, and the touch and smell of young girls, lipstick odor, powder odor, and the svelte lean scent of leather on the seats of convertibles” (334), challenges the psy- {{pg|243|244}}chic and spiritual re-invention of American selfhood through the lens of “beatniks” seeking instead occultism and ethnolingualisms that could, too, render the modern psyche more tenacious and redemptive. Ruggedness of personality performs the rejection of anti-capitalist calls to “revolution” while inviting Kerouacian masculinity: “For a little while it is all quite glorious. They are wise and aware and sick and the world outside is corrupt and they are the only ones who know it” (340). Yet the inclusion of communist pretenders such as Jansen, or even his presentation of Oswald Spengler commenting on “an acquisitive society” (340), gives us a dialectic that Kerouac and Ginsberg craved and continually re-wrote to express increasing knowledge of what was “beyond” the American mainstream, or even military-industrial complex. Hearn’s recurrent meditations on topos, technology, and rebellion anticipates the multicultural and multi-lifestyle possibilities for a new-fangled democracy with a much greater comprehension of the world. Into this, we may draw the soldiers at Anopopei and the freaks of Greenwich Village as mutual selves: the idea or façade of negotiation and communication is archetypally drawn as a struggle for ideological realization.

Interestingly enough, the strongest instance of romantic/sensual redemption through romantic love is the province of a Jewish soldier, Joey Goldstein. “The Cove of Brooklyn” stages achievement and knowledge, and the monetary realization of that knowledge, against stereotypes and depressive urban characteristics that perform ethnic and racial subjugation; in the context of ''The Naked and the Dead'', we may easily devise cultural and sensual rejuvenation as a mode of being and a learning of selfhood in an American social fabric ruled by racialism and racial denigration. Sexual anxiety and the emotional depth of romantic encounters were common to the writing of Jewish-American writers—from Bernard Malamud’s ''The Assistant'' to Isaac Bashevis Singer’s ambitious medieval fairy-tale ''The Slave'', we might underscore a redemptive theme to sexual lust as a being-creating metaphor that offsets both the severeness of Judaic religious conservatism and the constant tension between Jews and Christians who either envy them or wish to violently quell their religious difference. Goldstein happens through a characteristic tale of urban nurturing and economic self-realization. He falls in love and marries, then has a family. Social liminality is re-written optimistically and within a spirit of masculine confidence: “Shy sensitive girls may end up as poetesses or they may turn bitter and drink alone in bars, but nice shy sensitive Jewish girls usually marry and have children, gain two pounds {{pg|244|245}}a year, and worry more about refurbishing hats and trying a new casserole than about the meaning of life” (487). It was, of course, a classically beatnik ''ouevre'' to try and write the romantic and erotic generativity of the non- White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant man or woman, but Beat Generation novels and poems were less adept at recognizing the economic and social “success,” by mainstream terms: the covert brilliance of “the Other” was carefully guarded, a kind of secret that had evocative psychological power. Goldstein’s relationship with Natalie, and specifically the romantic death of that relationship during the maternity of the second child, projects a very different positioning of “the ethnic.” His/her social and cultural success, rather than promoting multi-ethnic ecstasies, strengthens ethnic traditions while focusing a point of modern, urban social maturity:
<blockquote>They expand, put on weight, and give money to charitable organizations to help refugees. They are sincere and friendly and happy, and nearly everyone likes them. As their son grows older, begins to talk, there are any number of pleasures they draw from him. They are content and the habits of marriage lap about them like a warm bath. They never feel great joy but they are rarely depressed, and nothing immediate is ever excessive or cruel. (491)</blockquote>
Jack Kerouac does not narrate the ethnic citizen’s realization of community and success until 1965 with the publication of ''Desolation Angels''. Mailer’s centrism, by contrast, envisions the spectacle of “beatnik” as a kind of temptation, an allure, to a spiritual outcome that is uncalculated and therefore misleading. Presenting the “Jewish” story, of course, overlooks very real gaps of cross-cultural understanding that Mailer deliberately puts in his soldiers: the positive xenophobia, plus the distortions of non-Western peoples such as the Japanese, again seriously distort any kind of populist or democratic ideal for a “Pax Americana.” Mailer’s penning of Goldstein diminishes the demographic and geographic concept of “the Other,” while retaining him as a modern subject borne of the fruit of social pluralism. Although the scope of otherness is limited, again a counter-thrust to beatnik eclecticism is given a very positive bearing, one which competes with narrated racisms to the present day.

We should remember that Mailer was a writer who faced the same crisis as the Beat Generation: that of publishing to earn a living. Still, Aronowitz’s {{pg|245|246}}essay underscores what we are often likely to dismiss—that their coinciding in the early 1940s breathed a kind of social estimation of American community and overall outlook. The harsh criticism, too, of “The White Negro,” although a key theme of Mailer’s recurrent centrism, veils a moment of social being that is the continuing effort and development of authorial translations of culture. Paraphrasing Oswald Spengler—for many critics the godfather of “Beat”—he establishes the continuity of literature instead of its schizophrenic and hasty re-drawing of consciousness and experience to suit political needs. In short, Mailer’s anticipation of the Beat Generation sustained a continuing moment of literary discovery: we find a delicious sort of foil that forecasts the problem and the praxis of modern American man’s social achievement.

===Citations===
{{reflist|20em}}

===Works Cited===
{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}
* {{cite book |last=Anderson |first=Sherwood |date=2005 |title=Winesburg, Ohio |location= New York|publisher=Signet |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Aronowitz |first=Alfred G. |date=18 May 1960 |title=Rev. of ''The Beats'', by Seymour Krim |work=The Village Voice |pages=1+ |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Chandarlapaty |first=Raj |date=2009 |title=The Beat Generation and Counterculture: Paul Bowles, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac |location=New York |publisher=Peter Lang |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Cirino |first=Mark |title=Norman Mailer’s ''The Fight'': Hemingway, Bullfighting, and the Lovely Metaphysics of Boxing |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=123-138 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Faulkner |first=William |date=1993 |title=The Sound and the Fury |editor-last1=Minter |editor-first1=David |location=New York |publisher=W.W.Norton |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1996 |title=The Old Man and The Sea |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Joyce |first=James |date=2011 |title=Ulysses |location=Oxford |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Kerouac |first=Jack |date=1996 |title=Selected Letters 1940–1956 |editor-last1=Charters |editor-first1=Ann |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Kerouac |first=Jack |authormask=1 |date=1948 |title=The Town and The City |location=New York |publisher=Harcourt Brace & Co |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Kerouac |first=Jack |authormask=1 |date=1972 |title=Visions of Cody |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lyotard |first=Jean-François |date=1984 |title=The Postmodern Condition |location=Minneapolis |publisher=U of Minnesota P |ref=harv }}
* {{cite letter |first=Norman |last=Mailer |subject= Letter to Michael McClure |date=17 February 1964 |location=University of Texas-Austin |publisher=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1959 |title= “The White Negro.” Advertisements for Myself |location=New York |publisher=G.P. Putnam’s Sons |pages=337-58 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Malamud |first=Bernard |date=1958 |title=The Assistant |location=New York |publisher=Signet |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=McClure |first=Michael |date=1969 |title=Ghost Tantras |location=San Francisco |publisher=Four Seasons Foundation |ref=harv }}
* {{cite letter |last=McClure |first=Michael |authormask=1 |subject= Letter to Norman Mailer |date=Feb 1964 |location=University of Texas-Austin |publisher=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=McClure |first=Michael |authormask=1 |date=1970 |title=Mad Cub |location=New York |publisher=Bantam |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |date=1992 |chapter=Naked Lunch on Trial |title=Naked Lunch. By William S. Burroughs |location=New York |publisher=Grove Press |pages=IX-XXXIV |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Singer |first=Isaac Bashevis |date=1988 |title=The Slave |location=New York |publisher=Farrar, Straus and Giroux |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Thurber |first=James |date=2000 |title=The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and Other Pieces |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |ref=harv }}

{{Review|state=expanded}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Through the Lens of the Beatniks: Norman Mailer and Modern American Man’s Quest for Self-Realization}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Through the Lens of the Beatniks: Norman Mailer and Modern American Man’s Quest for Self-Realization

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{{Byline|last=Chandarlapaty|first=Raj|abstract=An analysis of the relationship, similarities, and cultural connections between Mailer and the major Beat writers.}}
{{dc|dc=F|ew mid-century writers were friendly}} with the Beat Generation. Most, including Norman Mailer, cited their criminal and licentious impulses as an undermining tangling of ethically strong American sensibilities. I have noted Mailer’s criticism found in “The White Negro,” where Mailer sketched the unkempt and ghettoized portrait of white rebels such as Neal Cassady. Whether it is Mailer, Arthur Miller, or left poet-rockers such as Bob Dylan, or even fiction writers such as Truman Capote, the recurring message of a degenerated gang of would-be hoodlums abandoning mainstream lifestyles remained a cynical counter-step to the endless innovations and cultural adventurism that was unheard of for most Americans in the 1950s.

I realized that I had visited the literary spectacle of Norman Mailer but a few times: once, as a child, when ''The Executioner’s Song'' aired on ABC in 1980, and then, in 2007 when Mailer died at the age of 84. While a graduate student, I thought that he was compared unfavorably to Capote, with Mailer a kind of “copier,” an imitator of Capote’s much more virtuous meditation on crime and human psychology. The essays were very much in Capote’s favor. While reading ''The Naked and the Dead'', I began to understand something wholly detached from the occult glory, fame, and entertainer-super- star-politician thread that Mailer is famous for colonizing: Mailer was definitely interested in narrating the cerebration of modern man’s social and civic problems, and perhaps the direct challenge to American humankind’s {{pg|231|232}}democratic spirit when faced with the powerful and nature-deciding apparatus of institutions and authoritarianism. He writes the following of “The League of Omnipotent Men”:
<blockquote>You could kill the dozen men, and there would be another dozen to replace them, and another and another. Out of all the vast pressures and crosscurrents of history was evolving the archetype of twentieth-century man. The ''particular'' man who would direct it, make certain that “the natural role ...was anxiety.” The techniques had outraced the psyche. “The majority of men must be subservient to the machine and it’s not a business they instinctively enjoy.” And in the marginal area, the gap, were the peculiar tensions that birthed the dream. (''The Naked and the Dead'' 391)</blockquote>
As a whole, ''The Naked and the Dead'' snapshots very familiar wartime ground—the ethnic and racial jokes, the longing for sexuality and the thrust of jealousy, the protected incomprehension of foreign cultures that impaled American democracy with the very real contention that American mankind was simply not humanly prepared to lead the world at all. There is much more: first, this novel captures American manhood’s very real and gnawing psychic doubts and missteps, while dreamily transposing the economic and tactile miracle of long-standing American prosperity. Second, tactility is established in the above passage akin to the sentiments of Jack Kerouac—that in a modern world, we should lose our animate confidence, pride, and basically our intellectual ability to manage the fruit of both changing times and world responsibility. What I intend to depict in this essay, then, is Mailer’s increasing, if guarded, approval for some of the character and ethnographic foci of Beat writers. The letters and testimonies gathered from Harry Ransom Center overstate the anxiety, terror, and illuminating potential of the far-reaching hand of the new generation of literary bohemians, and therefore Mailer’s recognition that both democracy and culture would be in some way transformed by this shaded lens of cultural hereticism.

A remarkable exchange of letters between Mailer and Beat poet Michael McClure renders the flat authoritarianism of “The White Negro” as questionable, dialectic, and even chronologically false: Mailer’s letters to McClure certainly weigh in an approval of the occult ethnographies and mythologi-
{{pg|232|233}}cal wizardry of the Beat writers. Much of McClure’s correspondence date to 1964, and show an anxious McClure trying to publish a novel and some short manuscripts including “Untitled Novel,” “Ghost Tantras,” and “Mad Cub.” The letters from McClure, far in excess of what Mailer writes back—reflect a proselytizing tone, an aggressive eagerness to suggest beatnik ideas in the post-Beat era. One such letter, dated from February 1964, includes his rendition of the beatnik “legend” of writing mythology. What also becomes clear from this letter is McClure’s admiration of Mailer: he is close to idolizing Mailer as a literary godfather who can help him with his publishing fiction and poetry attests to a very different social and intellectual imagination than the curt criticisms found in “The White Negro.” Letters from Mailer are comparatively short, even handwritten. Letters from McClure are voluminous and copious in number. Mankind’s subconscious motivations, too, are an important theme in Mailer’s most acclaimed novels. What is less known was his appreciation of the mythological and anthropological adventuring of the Beats, and the impact of narco-criticism that could identify a very different dynamic to the motions of the psychic organism through drugs. Of course, we should be cognizant of the fact that the literary conventions of 1964 were very different from those of 1957. Clearly, however, Mailer is moved by the literary possibilities for conscious expansion and occult mythologies as they might derive or enhance American spirit.

On February 17, 1964, Mailer responded and expressed the visible tension between refinement and animate penning of self- and world-mythology that through the portrait of the writer gives credence to the art of discovery and self-promotion through writing. Mailer’s cautionary disdain is matched with an approval of the writing scene and the promotion of art and culture through writing, rather than an overstatement of the dilemmas of social realism. While far from a complete reversal of opinions and criticism in “The White Negro,” the anxiety of mentorship is given new impetus because of the cultural gap between the conservative-leaning 1950s and the explosive, global, revolutionary 1960s. Mailer projects an educated responsibility. He tacitly admits the relevance of liberalism and occultism in a less homogenous world, and coincides with some of the possibilities for excavating a modern epistemology against the tides of materialism and authoritarianism. “Flesh of the form” directly translates Sampas’s 1942 letter to Kerouac as that of authorial progeny—what could be said about the modern development of American manhood could be as easily said about the influence of writing {{pg|233|234}}on one’s imagination, and suggests a maybe-ambivalent directioning of the Beatnik social and intellectual “possibility” (Kerouac, ''Selected''). Egoistic granting of cultural status through writing modifies considerably the art of social revolution. What is clear is that Mailer recognizes in the Beat Generation a potential that was completely rejected by him at the embryonic time when the Beats were completely unrecognized and unpublished, not a factor at all in the making of ideas on the political world stage. That Mailer recognizes something going on that is subtle yet dramatically impactive borrows directly from his assuming tutelage to an ever-growing population of renegades—he has incorporated the concept of “beatnik” into his idea of the modern selfhood through the mask of writing itself. Mailer’s passion for the ego-soul and for the imaging and fame of American consciousness is here greatly altered and suggestive of a very new stage of development for him.

Mailer’s fairly paternal tone is contrastive with the general disapproval of publishers for “renegade” literatures that praise rebellion, animate power, and the ecstatic. We should, of course, remember that publishers denied Kerouac his attainment of literary glory for twelve years—and that most Beat novels and poetry were shunned or bowdlerized by editorial interpretations designed to protect doctrines of American conservatism. In the genesis of “Flower Power” and hippiedom, replete with animate, environmental, and occult glories, many literary greats presided over a degenerated bunch of would-be writers with no true talent. Paul Bowles’s Itesa apartment in Tangier was a classic example of the engine of failure when it came to collaborative re-invention of the modernist form, with many writers appearing at his apartment in a scheme of literary disfocus and psychic abandonment unreconcilable with the business of true literary production. We could even make much of the excursion of hipsters and hippies to remote regions of the world. That literary genius involved far-off travel implies the unsaleable quality of these ideas and the weakness and embryonic passiveness of those truly “fighting” the establishment and the military-industrial complex. The subject matter for McClure’s letters includes digests of ''Mad Cub'' and ''Ghost Tantras''. Both are tributes to primal, essential, animate reclamation of instinct and poetic animateness. Written in the early 1960s, they restate Sampas’s letter and the debacle between officialism and animate ownership of the psyche, the earth, and primordial consciousness. It is suggestible, of course, that Mailer saw enough self-characteristics in these narrations, but the pop-
{{pg|234|235}}ular message is clear enough. By 1964, Mailer saw in McClure what he would deny of Kerouac. He understood that “Beat” or “beatnik” inveighed a general sense of the development of modern Western man, and could not as easily confine the Beat literary works to a colonial scheming of its characters and ideas. That the “last” meeting of the Beat Generation takes place in 1964 in San Francisco heralds a “new” beginning, one in which literary production could be divorced from its older mentors and hence some of the political idealism that informed them. Mailer, by being paternalistic and circumspect, divines the prospect of literary acquisition as a developable strand of his own literary genius, and a recalculation of literary possibility to influence culture and therefore move forward the architectonic of American selfhood in the Modern Era. Mailer’s tone, in the letters, shows moments of warmth, authorial reciprocity in communications, and the lingering anxiety of publishing and its expectations from the writer. A shared anxiety is continuously documented in lieu of the 1964 political elections in the US.

Mailer was also commissioned by Allen Ginsberg and other Beat writers to testify against the censoring of Burroughs’s novel, ''Naked Lunch'', which was finally cleared of American censorship in 1966. Mailer testified that
<blockquote>We are richer for [Burroughs’s] record; and we are more impressive as a nation because a publisher can print that record and sell it in an open bookstore, sell it legally. It even offers a hint that the “Great Society,” which Lyndon Johnson speaks of, may not be merely a politician’s high wind, but indeed may have the hard seed of a new truth; for no ordinary society could have the bravery and moral honesty to stare down into the abyss of ''Naked Lunch''. But a Great Society can look into the chasm of its own potential Hell and recognize that it is stronger as a nation for possessing an artist who can come back from Hell with a portrait of its dimensions. (“''Naked''” XVII–XIX)</blockquote>
Mailer’s message here is very obvious—as a nation and as a “collective soul,” America and its conception of democracy are expanded and strengthened by the existence of drug-addicted literary genius. The phrasing of “dimensions of Hell” repeats the doctrine of American “learning” rather than the diminution, comedism, and nihilism of surrealist writers who also used drugs. We almost feel that Mailer believes that taking drugs is a step towards {{pg|235|236}}totalistic self-redemption and even cultural-historical redemption, an answering of the seemingly meaningless and jocular decay of the earlier beatniks who praised Black and other minorities for spawning the adulation of excess. Yet there is also an authorial recognition of grandeur and achievement: Burroughs may easily be mismatched against the United States Government in the sense that Burroughs’s written and social understandings of drugs, consciousness, addiction, and “culture” was far greater and considerably more objective and human. It is also very likely that Mailer saw reasons to praise Burroughs where he would have been reluctant to do so for Kerouac, that he recognized a gutsier and more cerebrated authorship and the promise of a more durable idealism. Surely, in the early part of the Twentieth Century, man’s understanding of narcotics was far from literary. Once again, the literary medium is a common ground, a moment of psychosocial development away from colonial or “Jim Crow” barbarizations meant to racialize and therefore diminish the true impact of suffering and intoxication upon the modern self. There is also an implied note of recognition of the changes in popular culture. Mailer’s comparatively centrist ''metier'' develops a much broader social understanding of drugs and their arguable utility in a rapidly changing world. Gone are the fantasies and undefined adventures that meshed with Victorian portraits of horror, and ushered in is a definable modern subject that is ''a part of'' the modern reality, lingual and otherwise. Mailer attempts this without giving any credence to occult or multicultural possibilities for experience: he is soberly realistic and attempts to incorporate a divergent stream of texts and their signification into the mainstream setting. Mailer’s typing of Burroughs as a “religious” writer maintains some of the traditional mask. However, he concurs with the portrait of a profound if terrifying reflection on the mind and its lingual construction of experience. His identifying religion and damnation give credence to the contemporary concept of drugs and rehabilitation, while escaping them by stressing “the real” and its influence on the modern society. The impulse to democratization, or rather a recognition of the form and humanity of drug-addicted experience, projects without much reservation the idea of a maturing spirit that is older, wiser, and with a greater grasp of psychic agency. Authoritarian dogma, then, is not refuted but rather channeled into a more intimate discussion, one favorable to the individual and to social freedoms. Although Mailer is not a strong proponent of the legalization of drugs, he certainly recognizes that writing about drugs contributed {{pg|236|237}}to a greater understanding, and maybe even the redemption, of man from his long-standing social and personal ills.

'''LITERARY COMPARISONS:'''

'''THE PROSPECT OF LITERARY GENIUS IN MODERN AMERICA, AND THE ESTIMATION OF MODERN CHARACTER'''

Whatever may be said about Mailer’s strong points of criticism in “The White Negro,” which was published the same year as ''On The Road'', Mailer’s publication of ''The Village Voice'' from the 1960s attests to his modifying presence, and even the expansion of “beatnik” into other areas of modern consciousness and social learning. A particularly interesting point of introduction came from Al Aronowitz’s May 18, 1960 column in ''The Village Voice'':
<blockquote>But actually Kerouac and Mailer have long been literary brothers, even if under each other’s skin. Which one founded the Beat Generation and which one merely found it is just a matter of semantics.... Perhaps it might be concluded that, in one way, Mailer found in his own mind what Kerouac found throughout America.</blockquote>
If the comparisons are misleading, they at least call to attention how both authors captured modern man’s impalement with both the outside world and with memory: the decidedly different paths to literary glory that are encapsulated in a comparison between “America” and “the mind” makes literary comparisons between the two men more problematic—that Mailer could be interpreted as mentalizing the anxiety of “beatnik” legend suggests a parallel writing of selfhood from external and internal experiences. The statement of literary co-writing could not be biographically more certain: both men served in the war, and forecasted their discoveries onto a new-fangled American who belonged as much to the world as to his particular region. Therefore, an exposition of literary and character similarities proposes a considerably greater selfhood and the alterity of the lens. Reading Mailer through the literary and character conventions of Kerouac deepens the anxiety and soul-redemptions of Spengler’s primary statement of civilizational “decline,” and maybe the impetus towards a rejuvenated social learning. Since the publication career of Mailer and Kerouac is very close in origin— {{pg|237|238}}Kerouac published his first novel one year after Mailer his—we may turn to the prospect of literary similarity and the makings of cultural and countercultural depth without referring to complex theoretical strategies that would make their core ideas seem radically and racially different.

The character identities, memories, and dislocative dreaming of ''The Naked and the Dead'' positively anticipates the legend of beatnik discovery and adventure; further, the stress in this novel is upon humanity, identity, and emotional attachment in a no man’s land of carnage and alienation. Mailer and Kerouac both address the spiritual decimation of the modern American. They call attention to the semiotic parameters of exile and self-diminution against the glowing possibility of “Pax Americana.” Both authors tread heavily on the same psychic/cultural ground: they match the tactility and emotional happinesses of humanity against the spectacle of a debilitating nightmare of a powerful abyss. Both authors struggle to match the inhumanity, moreover, of external or “foreign” cultures against the certainty of an American imagination of selfhood. Without approaching the emotional dread for what Jean-François Lyotard termed in postmodern literature the continuous revolution of forms (10), Mailer spindles dream, memory, and emotional renditions of faith against the hungering stresses of democracy and camaraderie in a dangerous military no-man’s land, passively anticipating a coming “New Era” that assembles memory against the threat of totalitarian mind-control. In many instances, very real tensions and hierarchical dimensions are muted so as to receive the delicious individuation and democratizing touch of pre-War dreaming: we are led to the confirmation of a deeply pensive American subject anxiously wandering through the intellectual transformation of his world. More succinctly, though, Mailer parallels Kerouacian impulses to inscribe emotions—love, the body, rusticity, and tactility as the architectonic of democratic “spirit.” We are ritualized subjects who imbibe in the indistinct and unpredictable mem-oirs of an older America that exuded a dramatic moment of self-satisfaction and refinement in its making of political theory. Fighting the inhuman standardizations of “post”-ness, too, is a valiant literary assemblage of facts and self-delineation. The American man’s sensoryness is the backdrop to his liberated self, his quest for personal redemption in a utopic world symbolizing his ethos borrowed from American community. Mark Cirino writes the following:
{{pg|238|239}}<blockquote>Fitzgerald and others have misconstrued aspects of Hemingway’s objectives, which Mailer grasped intuitively and intellectually. The central thrust to Hemingway’s literary project was to dramatize the compromised functioning of thought as the modern consciousness is incorporated into the violent activities of the twentieth-century man of action... (Hemingway) is disclosing the tension that defines his work, the internal struggle between a man of action and a man of thought. (126)</blockquote>
Yet the soldier’s reflection, or rather the peculiar moment of that reflection on one’s past, is what produces mankind’s idea of community, ethicality, and beauty. Notwithstanding the tremendous filmic possibilities of a quasi-pastoralist moment of reflection, “beatnik” accelerates the possibilities for an expanded romanticism: it draws memory, dream, and conversation against the tide of oppression, while Americanizing an anti-rational moment of cultural topos. Vulgarizing self-portrayals, moreover, project Sampas’s thematic idea of a “crude, raw, unfinished—superb” American being: more important, though, is the depth of similarity in terms of modern man’s cultural realization of himself (Kerouac, ''Selected'' 69). While modernism, akin to William Faulkner’s writing of internal memory in ''The Sound and the Fury'', is textualized through the narrative moment of confinement to the island of Anopopei, a pressingly beatnik sentiment is shared among a multi-ethnic troop which is bemusing the collective impact of humanity in the modern ''ethos'', painted in terms concrete, sensory, and lingual.

Scenes of romantic sensualism, as was common to Kerouac and certainly a major tour de force in Kerouac’s first novel, ''The Town And The City'', confirm the poeticity of American man’s modern journey to validate democracy and democratization. They also stage modern American man’s much-anticipated confrontation of undemocratic “post” officialism and conservatism. We could, of course, understand the kind of cultural-political battling between the two men when we read statements like these:
<div class="center" style="width: auto; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;">

'''POLACK''': (falsetto voice) I don’t know why I’m not more popular with the girls . . . I’m such an easy lay. (They all laugh.)

'''BROWN''': What do you think your girl friend is doing now? I’ll tell you what. It’s just about six A.M. now in America. She’s wakin’ up in bed with a guy who can give her just as much as you</div>

{{pg|239|240}}<div class="center" style="width: auto; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;">can, and she’s giving him the same goddam line she handed you. I tell you, Minetta, there ain’t a one of them you can trust. They’ll all cheat on you.

'''POLACK''': There ain’t a fuggin woman is any good.

'''MINETTA''': (weakly) Well, I ain’t worrying.

'''STANLEY''': It’s different with me. I got a kid.
'''BROWN''': The ones with kids are the worst. They’re the ones who’re bored and really need a good time. There ain’t a woman is worth a goddam. (Mailer, ''Naked'' 185–186)</div>

Of course, soldiers musing about their wives’ cheating habits restates the basic antagonism, both political and physical, between Mailer and Kerouac. One is out on the battlefield, away from the pleasures of life, perhaps stiffening his resolve and making him less likely to be lenient about social policy, while the other is mostly at home, free to expostulate the labyrinthine and otherwise juicy moments of pleasurable transcendence from the ordinary. Sexual jealousy, or “fighting for cunts,” probably influenced the medium of writing as much as it symbolized modern man’s quest for self-realization. It also deliciously problematizes Sampas’s statement of a “crude, raw, unfinished—superb” meta-modern man developing in the American context. While Mailer’s dramatization of romantic and sexual anxiety in ''The Naked And The Dead'' interrupts the syntactic form of being where Kerouac is free to propound and expostulate an ebullient and geographically diverse rebellion, Mailer’s account more dramatically stages the crises of modern American maleness, registering it as a psychic challenge to bring forth ethical and cultural vision in a changing world. Chapters exhuming memories of life before the war, entitled “The Time Machine,” represent a deeper sensual underpinning to the making of modern American selfhood and calculates the weight of modernist anxieties against the resilience of man’s spirit—economy, sexuality, faith, imagination, travel, education and psychology arrange the depth of modernist literary innovation and modern man’s social panic within the form of American male character. They restate the anxiety and possibility of man’s grasp of the “new” world without determining the ultimate course of action. That at least could predate Kerouac’s childhood memoirs in ''The Town And The City'': restating un-patriotic or hyper-patriotic moments of jingoism and hereticism predated the ro- {{pg|240|241}}mantic emphasis upon discovery, while nestling it in a crux of modern ultimacy that is inescapable rather than pleasantly redrawable.

In this segment, I compare and contrast three of the “Time Machine” chapters, which are Red Valsen, The Wandering Ministrel; Robert Hearn, The Addled Womb; and Joey Goldstein, The Cove of Brooklyn. In all three, the anxiety of being is coupled with the anticipation and imperfectness of man’s knowledge of a changing world that presents a new, challenging dynamic of political ideation and capitalist-cultural-metatechnologies that outmanuver the will and action of the American male self. The contrast between depressive novels such as William Faulkner’s ''The Sound And The Fury'', where a Harvard student commits suicide, and later modernisms such as Ernest Hemingway’s ''The Old Man And The Sea'', where an old fishermen doffs the outside world to restate his greatest quest within nature, mean to belabor the moment of modern anxiety in the development and redevelopment of self. Mailer’s soldiers are less emasculated than Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s ''Ulysses'' or Walter Mitty in the stories of James Thurber, but whether gay, roguish, or ethnic, they internalize the languages and imaginations of a newly cast modern world that tends to erase the ebullient masculine pastoralism of works such as Sherwood Anderson’s ''Winesburg, Ohio'' that molded a conception of modern man’s achievement through work, capitalism, education, and cultural longevity and maturity. Thus, the throbbing moment of self-doubt is captured against the spectacle of a powerful mass cultural redevelopment. It could be said that Mailer had thought through modern man’s special list of psychic and personal issues before Kerouac was to relocate them to physically and sensually liberating fantasy. American modernist novels, whether crammed with political news developments or littered with unlikely-sounding advertisements, elongate the spectacle of modern life and its circumstances—broadening, then, long-standing conceptions of American character and spirit rooted in premodern scripturalism and economic ingenuity, which must re-invent themselves as monumental counterweights to the infinite and coercive determinants of modern political realism. In the balance was a seemingly intractable American lingual, psychic, and cultural selfhood that was likely to tune out political ideas and even suppress them. Indeed, American notions of the outside world were far from objective and certain to overlook or misrepresent politically active beliefs and ideals as contrary to democracy and pluralism.

“The Wandering Ministrel” snapshots moments of Kerouacian rusticism {{pg|241|242}}and junked-out splendor. At reflective moments, the story of a coal-miner’s son facing the economic depression of his land falls into hoboed moments of brilliance long before Kerouac narrated them into the story of Cody Pomeray, in ''Visions of Cody'': “To a kid from a mining town, getting drunk in a flatcar on Saturday night is still fun. The horizon extends for a million miles over the silver cornfields” (Mailer, ''Naked'' 226). Sensualism also accompanies education, employment, and sexuality without dismissing or diminishing the emotions and conversations around social responsibility: “The Wandering Ministrel” finds Red facing as a youth the problems of economic depression and ethnocentric distaste for new generations of Americans from European and Euro-Jewish stock. “Sensualism” also renders the proliferation of technology in a spirit more dense and spiritualizing than that of Kerouac. Rather than technology being inferior to or less lyrically promotive than the cultural, natural, and ecstatic, technology chronologizes modern man’s social and intellectual development and mediates in a spirit friendly with American male rhetoric and personality:
<blockquote>In ‘thirty-five he works in a restaurant for almost a year, the best dishwasher they ever had. (The rush hour lasts from twelve to three at that end of the kitchen. The dishes come clanking down the dumbwaiter, and the tray man mops the food and grease with his hand, fingers the lipstick on the glasses to loosen it, and drops them in a rack. In the machine, the steam vibrates and sings, whips out at the other end, where the finish man pulls out the tray with tongs, and wiggles the plates with his fingertips as he flips them on a pile. You don’t grab it with your bare hand, Jack.) (228)</blockquote>
The thrill of sex, moreover, stages the economic and social anxieties of the post-World War II American rather than embolden a non-economic mobilization of transcendence, thereby equating the sensual with the realistic. We should remember that Kerouac’s motivations to render poetic and timeless the ecstatic or otherwise extra-normal pleasures and escapes of his generation rose from a materialistic spirit of confidence that permitted the ambitious re-drawing of the modern American experience. The staging of marital, sexual, and familial decline answers the tide of modern freedoms, both intellectual and sensual:
{{pg|242|243}}<poem style="margin-left:2em; float:left;">
You know, I’ll tell ya something, I don’t believe in God.
::You don’t mean that, Red!
::(Underneath the blanket his father’s body had been crushed
almost flat.) Yeah, that’s right, I just don’t believe in God.
::Sometimes I don’t either, Agnes says.
::Yeah, I can talk to you, ''you'' understand.
::Only you want to go away.
::Well. (There is the other knowledge. Her body is young and
strong and he knows the smell of her breasts, which are like powdered infant-flesh, but all the women turn to cordwood in the town.) You take that guy Joe Mackey who got Alice with a kid and left her, my own sister, but I tell ya I don’t blame him. You got to see that, Agnes.
::You’re cruel.
::Yeah, that’s right. It’s praise to the eighteen-year-old. (224)</poem>

“The Addled Womb” counter-creates “beatnik” to locate anxiety and doubt rather than aggressive countercultural critique. We may even hypothesize the envisioning of a deeper and more centrist rendition of poet Allen Ginsberg, a confirmed homosexual who rigorously and polemically applied Marxist critique to the military-industrial complex. The opening stanzas in- scribe the power and magnificence of mid-century America in terms of civilizational ''topos'': “No one ever really comprehends it, the vast table of America” (328), but the substitution of modern man’s nihilism instead of his faith and redemptive feelings counter-strategizes “beatnik” by proposing establishment and authority to inhere a classic moment of self-introspection, with layers of beneficence and destruction that rhetorically present tenacity rather than re-invention: “How do you conceive your own death, your own unimportance in all that man-created immensity, through all the marble vaults and brick ridges and the furnaces that lead to the market place? You always believe somehow that the world will end with your death. It is all more intense, more violent, more rutted than life anywhere else” (328).

True, the discordant gauging of Hearn between destruction, or conscious realization of destruction, and the gleeful portrait of the vices and pleasures of capitalist making, “AN AIRLINE TICKET TO ROMANTIC PLACES, and the touch and smell of young girls, lipstick odor, powder odor, and the svelte lean scent of leather on the seats of convertibles” (334), challenges the psy- {{pg|243|244}}chic and spiritual re-invention of American selfhood through the lens of “beatniks” seeking instead occultism and ethnolingualisms that could, too, render the modern psyche more tenacious and redemptive. Ruggedness of personality performs the rejection of anti-capitalist calls to “revolution” while inviting Kerouacian masculinity: “For a little while it is all quite glorious. They are wise and aware and sick and the world outside is corrupt and they are the only ones who know it” (340). Yet the inclusion of communist pretenders such as Jansen, or even his presentation of Oswald Spengler commenting on “an acquisitive society” (340), gives us a dialectic that Kerouac and Ginsberg craved and continually re-wrote to express increasing knowledge of what was “beyond” the American mainstream, or even military-industrial complex. Hearn’s recurrent meditations on topos, technology, and rebellion anticipates the multicultural and multi-lifestyle possibilities for a new-fangled democracy with a much greater comprehension of the world. Into this, we may draw the soldiers at Anopopei and the freaks of Greenwich Village as mutual selves: the idea or façade of negotiation and communication is archetypally drawn as a struggle for ideological realization.

Interestingly enough, the strongest instance of romantic/sensual redemption through romantic love is the province of a Jewish soldier, Joey Goldstein. “The Cove of Brooklyn” stages achievement and knowledge, and the monetary realization of that knowledge, against stereotypes and depressive urban characteristics that perform ethnic and racial subjugation; in the context of ''The Naked and the Dead'', we may easily devise cultural and sensual rejuvenation as a mode of being and a learning of selfhood in an American social fabric ruled by racialism and racial denigration. Sexual anxiety and the emotional depth of romantic encounters were common to the writing of Jewish-American writers—from Bernard Malamud’s ''The Assistant'' to Isaac Bashevis Singer’s ambitious medieval fairy-tale ''The Slave'', we might underscore a redemptive theme to sexual lust as a being-creating metaphor that offsets both the severeness of Judaic religious conservatism and the constant tension between Jews and Christians who either envy them or wish to violently quell their religious difference. Goldstein happens through a characteristic tale of urban nurturing and economic self-realization. He falls in love and marries, then has a family. Social liminality is re-written optimistically and within a spirit of masculine confidence: “Shy sensitive girls may end up as poetesses or they may turn bitter and drink alone in bars, but nice shy sensitive Jewish girls usually marry and have children, gain two pounds {{pg|244|245}}a year, and worry more about refurbishing hats and trying a new casserole than about the meaning of life” (487). It was, of course, a classically beatnik ''ouevre'' to try and write the romantic and erotic generativity of the non- White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant man or woman, but Beat Generation novels and poems were less adept at recognizing the economic and social “success,” by mainstream terms: the covert brilliance of “the Other” was carefully guarded, a kind of secret that had evocative psychological power. Goldstein’s relationship with Natalie, and specifically the romantic death of that relationship during the maternity of the second child, projects a very different positioning of “the ethnic.” His/her social and cultural success, rather than promoting multi-ethnic ecstasies, strengthens ethnic traditions while focusing a point of modern, urban social maturity:
<blockquote>They expand, put on weight, and give money to charitable organizations to help refugees. They are sincere and friendly and happy, and nearly everyone likes them. As their son grows older, begins to talk, there are any number of pleasures they draw from him. They are content and the habits of marriage lap about them like a warm bath. They never feel great joy but they are rarely depressed, and nothing immediate is ever excessive or cruel. (491)</blockquote>
Jack Kerouac does not narrate the ethnic citizen’s realization of community and success until 1965 with the publication of ''Desolation Angels''. Mailer’s centrism, by contrast, envisions the spectacle of “beatnik” as a kind of temptation, an allure, to a spiritual outcome that is uncalculated and therefore misleading. Presenting the “Jewish” story, of course, overlooks very real gaps of cross-cultural understanding that Mailer deliberately puts in his soldiers: the positive xenophobia, plus the distortions of non-Western peoples such as the Japanese, again seriously distort any kind of populist or democratic ideal for a “Pax Americana.” Mailer’s penning of Goldstein diminishes the demographic and geographic concept of “the Other,” while retaining him as a modern subject borne of the fruit of social pluralism. Although the scope of otherness is limited, again a counter-thrust to beatnik eclecticism is given a very positive bearing, one which competes with narrated racisms to the present day.

We should remember that Mailer was a writer who faced the same crisis as the Beat Generation: that of publishing to earn a living. Still, Aronowitz’s {{pg|245|246}}essay underscores what we are often likely to dismiss—that their coinciding in the early 1940s breathed a kind of social estimation of American community and overall outlook. The harsh criticism, too, of “The White Negro,” although a key theme of Mailer’s recurrent centrism, veils a moment of social being that is the continuing effort and development of authorial translations of culture. Paraphrasing Oswald Spengler—for many critics the godfather of “Beat”—he establishes the continuity of literature instead of its schizophrenic and hasty re-drawing of consciousness and experience to suit political needs. In short, Mailer’s anticipation of the Beat Generation sustained a continuing moment of literary discovery: we find a delicious sort of foil that forecasts the problem and the praxis of modern American man’s social achievement.

User:Maggiemrogers/sandbox

2025-04-13T20:51:51Z

Maggiemrogers:

I realized that I had visited the literary spectacle of Norman Mailer but a few times: once, as a child, when ''The Executioner’s Song'' aired on ABC in 1980, and then, in 2007 when Mailer died at the age of 84. While a graduate student, I thought that he was compared unfavorably to Capote, with Mailer a kind of “copier,” an imitator of Capote’s much more virtuous meditation on crime and human psychology. The essays were very much in Capote’s favor. While reading ''The Naked and the Dead'', I began to understand something wholly detached from the occult glory, fame, and entertainer-super- star-politician thread that Mailer is famous for colonizing: Mailer was definitely interested in narrating the cerebration of modern man’s social and civic problems, and perhaps the direct challenge to American humankind’s {{pg|231|232}}democratic spirit when faced with the powerful and nature-deciding apparatus of institutions and authoritarianism. He writes the following of “The League of Omnipotent Men”:
<blockquote>You could kill the dozen men, and there would be another dozen to replace them, and another and another. Out of all the vast pressures and crosscurrents of history was evolving the archetype of twentieth-century man. The ''particular'' man who would direct it, make certain that “the natural role ...was anxiety.” The techniques had outraced the psyche. “The majority of men must be subservient to the machine and it’s not a business they instinctively enjoy.” And in the marginal area, the gap, were the peculiar tensions that birthed the dream. (''The Naked and the Dead'' 391)</blockquote>
As a whole, ''The Naked and the Dead'' snapshots very familiar wartime ground—the ethnic and racial jokes, the longing for sexuality and the thrust of jealousy, the protected incomprehension of foreign cultures that impaled American democracy with the very real contention that American mankind was simply not humanly prepared to lead the world at all. There is much more: first, this novel captures American manhood’s very real and gnawing psychic doubts and missteps, while dreamily transposing the economic and tactile miracle of long-standing American prosperity. Second, tactility is established in the above passage akin to the sentiments of Jack Kerouac—that in a modern world, we should lose our animate confidence, pride, and basically our intellectual ability to manage the fruit of both changing times and world responsibility. What I intend to depict in this essay, then, is Mailer’s increasing, if guarded, approval for some of the character and ethnographic foci of Beat writers. The letters and testimonies gathered from Harry Ransom Center overstate the anxiety, terror, and illuminating potential of the far-reaching hand of the new generation of literary bohemians, and therefore Mailer’s recognition that both democracy and culture would be in some way transformed by this shaded lens of cultural hereticism.

A remarkable exchange of letters between Mailer and Beat poet Michael McClure renders the flat authoritarianism of “The White Negro” as questionable, dialectic, and even chronologically false: Mailer’s letters to McClure certainly weigh in an approval of the occult ethnographies and mythologi-
{{pg|232|233}}cal wizardry of the Beat writers. Much of McClure’s correspondence date to 1964, and show an anxious McClure trying to publish a novel and some short manuscripts including “Untitled Novel,” “Ghost Tantras,” and “Mad Cub.” The letters from McClure, far in excess of what Mailer writes back—reflect a proselytizing tone, an aggressive eagerness to suggest beatnik ideas in the post-Beat era. One such letter, dated from February 1964, includes his rendition of the beatnik “legend” of writing mythology. What also becomes clear from this letter is McClure’s admiration of Mailer: he is close to idolizing Mailer as a literary godfather who can help him with his publishing fiction and poetry attests to a very different social and intellectual imagination than the curt criticisms found in “The White Negro.” Letters from Mailer are comparatively short, even handwritten. Letters from McClure are voluminous and copious in number. Mankind’s subconscious motivations, too, are an important theme in Mailer’s most acclaimed novels. What is less known was his appreciation of the mythological and anthropological adventuring of the Beats, and the impact of narco-criticism that could identify a very different dynamic to the motions of the psychic organism through drugs. Of course, we should be cognizant of the fact that the literary conventions of 1964 were very different from those of 1957. Clearly, however, Mailer is moved by the literary possibilities for conscious expansion and occult mythologies as they might derive or enhance American spirit.

On February 17, 1964, Mailer responded and expressed the visible tension between refinement and animate penning of self- and world-mythology that through the portrait of the writer gives credence to the art of discovery and self-promotion through writing. Mailer’s cautionary disdain is matched with an approval of the writing scene and the promotion of art and culture through writing, rather than an overstatement of the dilemmas of social realism. While far from a complete reversal of opinions and criticism in “The White Negro,” the anxiety of mentorship is given new impetus because of the cultural gap between the conservative-leaning 1950s and the explosive, global, revolutionary 1960s. Mailer projects an educated responsibility. He tacitly admits the relevance of liberalism and occultism in a less homogenous world, and coincides with some of the possibilities for excavating a modern epistemology against the tides of materialism and authoritarianism. “Flesh of the form” directly translates Sampas’s 1942 letter to Kerouac as that of authorial progeny—what could be said about the modern development of American manhood could be as easily said about the influence of writing {{pg|233|234}}on one’s imagination, and suggests a maybe-ambivalent directioning of the Beatnik social and intellectual “possibility” (Kerouac, ''Selected''). Egoistic granting of cultural status through writing modifies considerably the art of social revolution. What is clear is that Mailer recognizes in the Beat Generation a potential that was completely rejected by him at the embryonic time when the Beats were completely unrecognized and unpublished, not a factor at all in the making of ideas on the political world stage. That Mailer recognizes something going on that is subtle yet dramatically impactive borrows directly from his assuming tutelage to an ever-growing population of renegades—he has incorporated the concept of “beatnik” into his idea of the modern selfhood through the mask of writing itself. Mailer’s passion for the ego-soul and for the imaging and fame of American consciousness is here greatly altered and suggestive of a very new stage of development for him.

Mailer’s fairly paternal tone is contrastive with the general disapproval of publishers for “renegade” literatures that praise rebellion, animate power, and the ecstatic. We should, of course, remember that publishers denied Kerouac his attainment of literary glory for twelve years—and that most Beat novels and poetry were shunned or bowdlerized by editorial interpretations designed to protect doctrines of American conservatism. In the genesis of “Flower Power” and hippiedom, replete with animate, environmental, and occult glories, many literary greats presided over a degenerated bunch of would-be writers with no true talent. Paul Bowles’s Itesa apartment in Tangier was a classic example of the engine of failure when it came to collaborative re-invention of the modernist form, with many writers appearing at his apartment in a scheme of literary disfocus and psychic abandonment unreconcilable with the business of true literary production. We could even make much of the excursion of hipsters and hippies to remote regions of the world. That literary genius involved far-off travel implies the unsaleable quality of these ideas and the weakness and embryonic passiveness of those truly “fighting” the establishment and the military-industrial complex. The subject matter for McClure’s letters includes digests of ''Mad Cub'' and ''Ghost Tantras''. Both are tributes to primal, essential, animate reclamation of instinct and poetic animateness. Written in the early 1960s, they restate Sampas’s letter and the debacle between officialism and animate ownership of the psyche, the earth, and primordial consciousness. It is suggestible, of course, that Mailer saw enough self-characteristics in these narrations, but the pop-
{{pg|234|235}}ular message is clear enough. By 1964, Mailer saw in McClure what he would deny of Kerouac. He understood that “Beat” or “beatnik” inveighed a general sense of the development of modern Western man, and could not as easily confine the Beat literary works to a colonial scheming of its characters and ideas. That the “last” meeting of the Beat Generation takes place in 1964 in San Francisco heralds a “new” beginning, one in which literary production could be divorced from its older mentors and hence some of the political idealism that informed them. Mailer, by being paternalistic and circumspect, divines the prospect of literary acquisition as a developable strand of his own literary genius, and a recalculation of literary possibility to influence culture and therefore move forward the architectonic of American selfhood in the Modern Era. Mailer’s tone, in the letters, shows moments of warmth, authorial reciprocity in communications, and the lingering anxiety of publishing and its expectations from the writer. A shared anxiety is continuously documented in lieu of the 1964 political elections in the US.

Mailer was also commissioned by Allen Ginsberg and other Beat writers to testify against the censoring of Burroughs’s novel, ''Naked Lunch'', which was finally cleared of American censorship in 1966. Mailer testified that
<blockquote>We are richer for [Burroughs’s] record; and we are more impressive as a nation because a publisher can print that record and sell it in an open bookstore, sell it legally. It even offers a hint that the “Great Society,” which Lyndon Johnson speaks of, may not be merely a politician’s high wind, but indeed may have the hard seed of a new truth; for no ordinary society could have the bravery and moral honesty to stare down into the abyss of ''Naked Lunch''. But a Great Society can look into the chasm of its own potential Hell and recognize that it is stronger as a nation for possessing an artist who can come back from Hell with a portrait of its dimensions. (“''Naked''” XVII–XIX)</blockquote>
Mailer’s message here is very obvious—as a nation and as a “collective soul,” America and its conception of democracy are expanded and strengthened by the existence of drug-addicted literary genius. The phrasing of “dimensions of Hell” repeats the doctrine of American “learning” rather than the diminution, comedism, and nihilism of surrealist writers who also used drugs. We almost feel that Mailer believes that taking drugs is a step towards {{pg|235|236}}totalistic self-redemption and even cultural-historical redemption, an answering of the seemingly meaningless and jocular decay of the earlier beatniks who praised Black and other minorities for spawning the adulation of excess. Yet there is also an authorial recognition of grandeur and achievement: Burroughs may easily be mismatched against the United States Government in the sense that Burroughs’s written and social understandings of drugs, consciousness, addiction, and “culture” was far greater and considerably more objective and human. It is also very likely that Mailer saw reasons to praise Burroughs where he would have been reluctant to do so for Kerouac, that he recognized a gutsier and more cerebrated authorship and the promise of a more durable idealism. Surely, in the early part of the Twentieth Century, man’s understanding of narcotics was far from literary. Once again, the literary medium is a common ground, a moment of psychosocial development away from colonial or “Jim Crow” barbarizations meant to racialize and therefore diminish the true impact of suffering and intoxication upon the modern self. There is also an implied note of recognition of the changes in popular culture. Mailer’s comparatively centrist ''metier'' develops a much broader social understanding of drugs and their arguable utility in a rapidly changing world. Gone are the fantasies and undefined adventures that meshed with Victorian portraits of horror, and ushered in is a definable modern subject that is ''a part of'' the modern reality, lingual and otherwise. Mailer attempts this without giving any credence to occult or multicultural possibilities for experience: he is soberly realistic and attempts to incorporate a divergent stream of texts and their signification into the mainstream setting. Mailer’s typing of Burroughs as a “religious” writer maintains some of the traditional mask. However, he concurs with the portrait of a profound if terrifying reflection on the mind and its lingual construction of experience. His identifying religion and damnation give credence to the contemporary concept of drugs and rehabilitation, while escaping them by stressing “the real” and its influence on the modern society. The impulse to democratization, or rather a recognition of the form and humanity of drug-addicted experience, projects without much reservation the idea of a maturing spirit that is older, wiser, and with a greater grasp of psychic agency. Authoritarian dogma, then, is not refuted but rather channeled into a more intimate discussion, one favorable to the individual and to social freedoms. Although Mailer is not a strong proponent of the legalization of drugs, he certainly recognizes that writing about drugs contributed {{pg|236|237}}to a greater understanding, and maybe even the redemption, of man from his long-standing social and personal ills.

'''LITERARY COMPARISONS:'''

'''THE PROSPECT OF LITERARY GENIUS IN MODERN AMERICA, AND THE ESTIMATION OF MODERN CHARACTER'''

Whatever may be said about Mailer’s strong points of criticism in “The White Negro,” which was published the same year as ''On The Road'', Mailer’s publication of ''The Village Voice'' from the 1960s attests to his modifying presence, and even the expansion of “beatnik” into other areas of modern consciousness and social learning. A particularly interesting point of introduction came from Al Aronowitz’s May 18, 1960 column in ''The Village Voice'':
<blockquote>But actually Kerouac and Mailer have long been literary brothers, even if under each other’s skin. Which one founded the Beat Generation and which one merely found it is just a matter of semantics.... Perhaps it might be concluded that, in one way, Mailer found in his own mind what Kerouac found throughout America.</blockquote>
If the comparisons are misleading, they at least call to attention how both authors captured modern man’s impalement with both the outside world and with memory: the decidedly different paths to literary glory that are encapsulated in a comparison between “America” and “the mind” makes literary comparisons between the two men more problematic—that Mailer could be interpreted as mentalizing the anxiety of “beatnik” legend suggests a parallel writing of selfhood from external and internal experiences. The statement of literary co-writing could not be biographically more certain: both men served in the war, and forecasted their discoveries onto a new-fangled American who belonged as much to the world as to his particular region. Therefore, an exposition of literary and character similarities proposes a considerably greater selfhood and the alterity of the lens. Reading Mailer through the literary and character conventions of Kerouac deepens the anxiety and soul-redemptions of Spengler’s primary statement of civilizational “decline,” and maybe the impetus towards a rejuvenated social learning. Since the publication career of Mailer and Kerouac is very close in origin— {{pg|237|238}}Kerouac published his first novel one year after Mailer his—we may turn to the prospect of literary similarity and the makings of cultural and countercultural depth without referring to complex theoretical strategies that would make their core ideas seem radically and racially different.

The character identities, memories, and dislocative dreaming of ''The Naked and the Dead'' positively anticipates the legend of beatnik discovery and adventure; further, the stress in this novel is upon humanity, identity, and emotional attachment in a no man’s land of carnage and alienation. Mailer and Kerouac both address the spiritual decimation of the modern American. They call attention to the semiotic parameters of exile and self-diminution against the glowing possibility of “Pax Americana.” Both authors tread heavily on the same psychic/cultural ground: they match the tactility and emotional happinesses of humanity against the spectacle of a debilitating nightmare of a powerful abyss. Both authors struggle to match the inhumanity, moreover, of external or “foreign” cultures against the certainty of an American imagination of selfhood. Without approaching the emotional dread for what Jean-François Lyotard termed in postmodern literature the continuous revolution of forms (10), Mailer spindles dream, memory, and emotional renditions of faith against the hungering stresses of democracy and camaraderie in a dangerous military no-man’s land, passively anticipating a coming “New Era” that assembles memory against the threat of totalitarian mind-control. In many instances, very real tensions and hierarchical dimensions are muted so as to receive the delicious individuation and democratizing touch of pre-War dreaming: we are led to the confirmation of a deeply pensive American subject anxiously wandering through the intellectual transformation of his world. More succinctly, though, Mailer parallels Kerouacian impulses to inscribe emotions—love, the body, rusticity, and tactility as the architectonic of democratic “spirit.” We are ritualized subjects who imbibe in the indistinct and unpredictable mem-oirs of an older America that exuded a dramatic moment of self-satisfaction and refinement in its making of political theory. Fighting the inhuman standardizations of “post”-ness, too, is a valiant literary assemblage of facts and self-delineation. The American man’s sensoryness is the backdrop to his liberated self, his quest for personal redemption in a utopic world symbolizing his ethos borrowed from American community. Mark Cirino writes the following:
{{pg|238|239}}<blockquote>Fitzgerald and others have misconstrued aspects of Hemingway’s objectives, which Mailer grasped intuitively and intellectually. The central thrust to Hemingway’s literary project was to dramatize the compromised functioning of thought as the modern consciousness is incorporated into the violent activities of the twentieth-century man of action... (Hemingway) is disclosing the tension that defines his work, the internal struggle between a man of action and a man of thought. (126)</blockquote>
Yet the soldier’s reflection, or rather the peculiar moment of that reflection on one’s past, is what produces mankind’s idea of community, ethicality, and beauty. Notwithstanding the tremendous filmic possibilities of a quasi-pastoralist moment of reflection, “beatnik” accelerates the possibilities for an expanded romanticism: it draws memory, dream, and conversation against the tide of oppression, while Americanizing an anti-rational moment of cultural topos. Vulgarizing self-portrayals, moreover, project Sampas’s thematic idea of a “crude, raw, unfinished—superb” American being: more important, though, is the depth of similarity in terms of modern man’s cultural realization of himself (Kerouac, ''Selected'' 69). While modernism, akin to William Faulkner’s writing of internal memory in ''The Sound and the Fury'', is textualized through the narrative moment of confinement to the island of Anopopei, a pressingly beatnik sentiment is shared among a multi-ethnic troop which is bemusing the collective impact of humanity in the modern ''ethos'', painted in terms concrete, sensory, and lingual.

Scenes of romantic sensualism, as was common to Kerouac and certainly a major tour de force in Kerouac’s first novel, ''The Town And The City'', confirm the poeticity of American man’s modern journey to validate democracy and democratization. They also stage modern American man’s much-anticipated confrontation of undemocratic “post” officialism and conservatism. We could, of course, understand the kind of cultural-political battling between the two men when we read statements like these:
<div class="center" style="width: auto; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;">

'''POLACK''': (falsetto voice) I don’t know why I’m not more popular with the girls . . . I’m such an easy lay. (They all laugh.)

'''BROWN''': What do you think your girl friend is doing now? I’ll tell you what. It’s just about six A.M. now in America. She’s wakin’ up in bed with a guy who can give her just as much as you</div>

{{pg|239|240}}<div class="center" style="width: auto; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;">can, and she’s giving him the same goddam line she handed you. I tell you, Minetta, there ain’t a one of them you can trust. They’ll all cheat on you.

'''POLACK''': There ain’t a fuggin woman is any good.

'''MINETTA''': (weakly) Well, I ain’t worrying.

'''STANLEY''': It’s different with me. I got a kid.
'''BROWN''': The ones with kids are the worst. They’re the ones who’re bored and really need a good time. There ain’t a woman is worth a goddam. (Mailer, ''Naked'' 185–186)</div>

Of course, soldiers musing about their wives’ cheating habits restates the basic antagonism, both political and physical, between Mailer and Kerouac. One is out on the battlefield, away from the pleasures of life, perhaps stiffening his resolve and making him less likely to be lenient about social policy, while the other is mostly at home, free to expostulate the labyrinthine and otherwise juicy moments of pleasurable transcendence from the ordinary. Sexual jealousy, or “fighting for cunts,” probably influenced the medium of writing as much as it symbolized modern man’s quest for self-realization. It also deliciously problematizes Sampas’s statement of a “crude, raw, unfinished—superb” meta-modern man developing in the American context. While Mailer’s dramatization of romantic and sexual anxiety in ''The Naked And The Dead'' interrupts the syntactic form of being where Kerouac is free to propound and expostulate an ebullient and geographically diverse rebellion, Mailer’s account more dramatically stages the crises of modern American maleness, registering it as a psychic challenge to bring forth ethical and cultural vision in a changing world. Chapters exhuming memories of life before the war, entitled “The Time Machine,” represent a deeper sensual underpinning to the making of modern American selfhood and calculates the weight of modernist anxieties against the resilience of man’s spirit—economy, sexuality, faith, imagination, travel, education and psychology arrange the depth of modernist literary innovation and modern man’s social panic within the form of American male character. They restate the anxiety and possibility of man’s grasp of the “new” world without determining the ultimate course of action. That at least could predate Kerouac’s childhood memoirs in ''The Town And The City'': restating un-patriotic or hyper-patriotic moments of jingoism and hereticism predated the ro- {{pg|240|241}}mantic emphasis upon discovery, while nestling it in a crux of modern ultimacy that is inescapable rather than pleasantly redrawable.

In this segment, I compare and contrast three of the “Time Machine” chapters, which are Red Valsen, The Wandering Ministrel; Robert Hearn, The Addled Womb; and Joey Goldstein, The Cove of Brooklyn. In all three, the anxiety of being is coupled with the anticipation and imperfectness of man’s knowledge of a changing world that presents a new, challenging dynamic of political ideation and capitalist-cultural-metatechnologies that outmanuver the will and action of the American male self. The contrast between depressive novels such as William Faulkner’s ''The Sound And The Fury'', where a Harvard student commits suicide, and later modernisms such as Ernest Hemingway’s ''The Old Man And The Sea'', where an old fishermen doffs the outside world to restate his greatest quest within nature, mean to belabor the moment of modern anxiety in the development and redevelopment of self. Mailer’s soldiers are less emasculated than Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s ''Ulysses'' or Walter Mitty in the stories of James Thurber, but whether gay, roguish, or ethnic, they internalize the languages and imaginations of a newly cast modern world that tends to erase the ebullient masculine pastoralism of works such as Sherwood Anderson’s ''Winesburg, Ohio'' that molded a conception of modern man’s achievement through work, capitalism, education, and cultural longevity and maturity. Thus, the throbbing moment of self-doubt is captured against the spectacle of a powerful mass cultural redevelopment. It could be said that Mailer had thought through modern man’s special list of psychic and personal issues before Kerouac was to relocate them to physically and sensually liberating fantasy. American modernist novels, whether crammed with political news developments or littered with unlikely-sounding advertisements, elongate the spectacle of modern life and its circumstances—broadening, then, long-standing conceptions of American character and spirit rooted in premodern scripturalism and economic ingenuity, which must re-invent themselves as monumental counterweights to the infinite and coercive determinants of modern political realism. In the balance was a seemingly intractable American lingual, psychic, and cultural selfhood that was likely to tune out political ideas and even suppress them. Indeed, American notions of the outside world were far from objective and certain to overlook or misrepresent politically active beliefs and ideals as contrary to democracy and pluralism.

“The Wandering Ministrel” snapshots moments of Kerouacian rusticism {{pg|241|242}}and junked-out splendor. At reflective moments, the story of a coal-miner’s son facing the economic depression of his land falls into hoboed moments of brilliance long before Kerouac narrated them into the story of Cody Pomeray, in ''Visions of Cody'': “To a kid from a mining town, getting drunk in a flatcar on Saturday night is still fun. The horizon extends for a million miles over the silver cornfields” (Mailer, ''Naked'' 226). Sensualism also accompanies education, employment, and sexuality without dismissing or diminishing the emotions and conversations around social responsibility: “The Wandering Ministrel” finds Red facing as a youth the problems of economic depression and ethnocentric distaste for new generations of Americans from European and Euro-Jewish stock. “Sensualism” also renders the proliferation of technology in a spirit more dense and spiritualizing than that of Kerouac. Rather than technology being inferior to or less lyrically promotive than the cultural, natural, and ecstatic, technology chronologizes modern man’s social and intellectual development and mediates in a spirit friendly with American male rhetoric and personality:
<blockquote>In ‘thirty-five he works in a restaurant for almost a year, the best dishwasher they ever had. (The rush hour lasts from twelve to three at that end of the kitchen. The dishes come clanking down the dumbwaiter, and the tray man mops the food and grease with his hand, fingers the lipstick on the glasses to loosen it, and drops them in a rack. In the machine, the steam vibrates and sings, whips out at the other end, where the finish man pulls out the tray with tongs, and wiggles the plates with his fingertips as he flips them on a pile. You don’t grab it with your bare hand, Jack.) (228)</blockquote>
The thrill of sex, moreover, stages the economic and social anxieties of the post-World War II American rather than embolden a non-economic mobilization of transcendence, thereby equating the sensual with the realistic. We should remember that Kerouac’s motivations to render poetic and timeless the ecstatic or otherwise extra-normal pleasures and escapes of his generation rose from a materialistic spirit of confidence that permitted the ambitious re-drawing of the modern American experience. The staging of marital, sexual, and familial decline answers the tide of modern freedoms, both intellectual and sensual:
{{pg|242|243}}<poem style="margin-left:2em; float:left;">
You know, I’ll tell ya something, I don’t believe in God.
::You don’t mean that, Red!
::(Underneath the blanket his father’s body had been crushed
almost flat.) Yeah, that’s right, I just don’t believe in God.
::Sometimes I don’t either, Agnes says.
::Yeah, I can talk to you, ''you'' understand.
::Only you want to go away.
::Well. (There is the other knowledge. Her body is young and
strong and he knows the smell of her breasts, which are like powdered infant-flesh, but all the women turn to cordwood in the town.) You take that guy Joe Mackey who got Alice with a kid and left her, my own sister, but I tell ya I don’t blame him. You got to see that, Agnes.
::You’re cruel.
::Yeah, that’s right. It’s praise to the eighteen-year-old. (224)</poem>

“The Addled Womb” counter-creates “beatnik” to locate anxiety and doubt rather than aggressive countercultural critique. We may even hypothesize the envisioning of a deeper and more centrist rendition of poet Allen Ginsberg, a confirmed homosexual who rigorously and polemically applied Marxist critique to the military-industrial complex. The opening stanzas in- scribe the power and magnificence of mid-century America in terms of civilizational ''topos'': “No one ever really comprehends it, the vast table of America” (328), but the substitution of modern man’s nihilism instead of his faith and redemptive feelings counter-strategizes “beatnik” by proposing establishment and authority to inhere a classic moment of self-introspection, with layers of beneficence and destruction that rhetorically present tenacity rather than re-invention: “How do you conceive your own death, your own unimportance in all that man-created immensity, through all the marble vaults and brick ridges and the furnaces that lead to the market place? You always believe somehow that the world will end with your death. It is all more intense, more violent, more rutted than life anywhere else” (328).

True, the discordant gauging of Hearn between destruction, or conscious realization of destruction, and the gleeful portrait of the vices and pleasures of capitalist making, “AN AIRLINE TICKET TO ROMANTIC PLACES, and the touch and smell of young girls, lipstick odor, powder odor, and the svelte lean scent of leather on the seats of convertibles” (334), challenges the psy- {{pg|243|244}}chic and spiritual re-invention of American selfhood through the lens of “beatniks” seeking instead occultism and ethnolingualisms that could, too, render the modern psyche more tenacious and redemptive. Ruggedness of personality performs the rejection of anti-capitalist calls to “revolution” while inviting Kerouacian masculinity: “For a little while it is all quite glorious. They are wise and aware and sick and the world outside is corrupt and they are the only ones who know it” (340). Yet the inclusion of communist pretenders such as Jansen, or even his presentation of Oswald Spengler commenting on “an acquisitive society” (340), gives us a dialectic that Kerouac and Ginsberg craved and continually re-wrote to express increasing knowledge of what was “beyond” the American mainstream, or even military-industrial complex. Hearn’s recurrent meditations on topos, technology, and rebellion anticipates the multicultural and multi-lifestyle possibilities for a new-fangled democracy with a much greater comprehension of the world. Into this, we may draw the soldiers at Anopopei and the freaks of Greenwich Village as mutual selves: the idea or façade of negotiation and communication is archetypally drawn as a struggle for ideological realization.

Interestingly enough, the strongest instance of romantic/sensual redemption through romantic love is the province of a Jewish soldier, Joey Goldstein. “The Cove of Brooklyn” stages achievement and knowledge, and the monetary realization of that knowledge, against stereotypes and depressive urban characteristics that perform ethnic and racial subjugation; in the context of ''The Naked and the Dead'', we may easily devise cultural and sensual rejuvenation as a mode of being and a learning of selfhood in an American social fabric ruled by racialism and racial denigration. Sexual anxiety and the emotional depth of romantic encounters were common to the writing of Jewish-American writers—from Bernard Malamud’s ''The Assistant'' to Isaac Bashevis Singer’s ambitious medieval fairy-tale ''The Slave'', we might underscore a redemptive theme to sexual lust as a being-creating metaphor that offsets both the severeness of Judaic religious conservatism and the constant tension between Jews and Christians who either envy them or wish to violently quell their religious difference. Goldstein happens through a characteristic tale of urban nurturing and economic self-realization. He falls in love and marries, then has a family. Social liminality is re-written optimistically and within a spirit of masculine confidence: “Shy sensitive girls may end up as poetesses or they may turn bitter and drink alone in bars, but nice shy sensitive Jewish girls usually marry and have children, gain two pounds {{pg|244|245}}a year, and worry more about refurbishing hats and trying a new casserole than about the meaning of life” (487). It was, of course, a classically beatnik ''ouevre'' to try and write the romantic and erotic generativity of the non- White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant man or woman, but Beat Generation novels and poems were less adept at recognizing the economic and social “success,” by mainstream terms: the covert brilliance of “the Other” was carefully guarded, a kind of secret that had evocative psychological power. Goldstein’s relationship with Natalie, and specifically the romantic death of that relationship during the maternity of the second child, projects a very different positioning of “the ethnic.” His/her social and cultural success, rather than promoting multi-ethnic ecstasies, strengthens ethnic traditions while focusing a point of modern, urban social maturity:
<blockquote>They expand, put on weight, and give money to charitable organizations to help refugees. They are sincere and friendly and happy, and nearly everyone likes them. As their son grows older, begins to talk, there are any number of pleasures they draw from him. They are content and the habits of marriage lap about them like a warm bath. They never feel great joy but they are rarely depressed, and nothing immediate is ever excessive or cruel. (491)</blockquote>
Jack Kerouac does not narrate the ethnic citizen’s realization of community and success until 1965 with the publication of ''Desolation Angels''. Mailer’s centrism, by contrast, envisions the spectacle of “beatnik” as a kind of temptation, an allure, to a spiritual outcome that is uncalculated and therefore misleading. Presenting the “Jewish” story, of course, overlooks very real gaps of cross-cultural understanding that Mailer deliberately puts in his soldiers: the positive xenophobia, plus the distortions of non-Western peoples such as the Japanese, again seriously distort any kind of populist or democratic ideal for a “Pax Americana.” Mailer’s penning of Goldstein diminishes the demographic and geographic concept of “the Other,” while retaining him as a modern subject borne of the fruit of social pluralism. Although the scope of otherness is limited, again a counter-thrust to beatnik eclecticism is given a very positive bearing, one which competes with narrated racisms to the present day.

We should remember that Mailer was a writer who faced the same crisis as the Beat Generation: that of publishing to earn a living. Still, Aronowitz’s {{pg|245|246}}essay underscores what we are often likely to dismiss—that their coinciding in the early 1940s breathed a kind of social estimation of American community and overall outlook. The harsh criticism, too, of “The White Negro,” although a key theme of Mailer’s recurrent centrism, veils a moment of social being that is the continuing effort and development of authorial translations of culture. Paraphrasing Oswald Spengler—for many critics the godfather of “Beat”—he establishes the continuity of literature instead of its schizophrenic and hasty re-drawing of consciousness and experience to suit political needs. In short, Mailer’s anticipation of the Beat Generation sustained a continuing moment of literary discovery: we find a delicious sort of foil that forecasts the problem and the praxis of modern American man’s social achievement.

User:Maggiemrogers/sandbox

2025-04-13T19:13:04Z

Maggiemrogers:

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Through the Lens of the Beatniks: Norman Mailer and Modern American Man’s Quest for Self-Realization

2025-04-13T18:33:04Z

Maggiemrogers:

User:Maggiemrogers/sandbox

2025-04-13T18:32:06Z

Maggiemrogers:

Talk:The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011

2025-04-13T18:14:03Z

Maggiemrogers: I assigned another volume 5 article to myself

===Article Assignments, Vol. 5===
You will need to request an article and user name for {{PM}}. You may click the link to your article below to begin your edits. Status indicators in the ? column: {{tick}} = complete (ready for final edits and banner removal); {{yellow tick}} = in process; {{cross}} = not started.

{| class="wikitable sortable" style="width: 100%;"
|-
! Author !! Article !! Editor !! ?
|-
| Mailer, M. || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Overexposed: My First Taste of Filmmaking|My First Taste of Filmmaking]] || [[User:Grlucas]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Rhodes || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|The Films of Norman Mailer]] || [[User:TPoole]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Cohen || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law|Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness]] || [[User:Daddy D]] || {{yellow tick}}
|-
| Mitchell || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer: Playboy Magazine Heavyweight|''Playboy'' Magazine Heavyweight]] || [[User:NrmMGA5108]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Gladstein || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Piling On: Norman Mailer’s Utilization of Marilyn Monroe|Piling On]] || [[User:MerAtticus]] || {{yellow tick}}
|-
| Kaufmann || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Cluster Seeds and the Mailer Legacy|Cluster Seeds and the Mailer Legacy]] || [[User:ADavis]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Spinks || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics|Situating Hemingway]] || [[User:Cbrow34]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Peczenik || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in The Castle in the Forest|The Devil's Party]] || [[User:Maggiemrogers]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Hicks || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/From Here to Eternity and The Naked and the Dead: Premiere to Eternity?|''From Here to Eternity'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'']] || [[User:THarrell]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Mantzaris || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of “Totalitarianism”|Contradictory Syntheses]] || [[User:JKilchenmann]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Sermeus || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking]] || [[User:Erhernandez]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Borkowski || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/A Tear Shed into a Cup of Sorrows|A Tear Shed into a Cup of Sorrows]] || [[User:Grlucas]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Moreland || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Hemingway and Women at the Front: Blowing Bridges in The Fifth Column, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Other Works|Hemingway and Women at the Front]] || [[User:LogansPop22]] || {{yellow tick}}
|-
| Yirinec || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility]] || [[User:JHadaway]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Toback || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]] || [[User:Kamyers]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Chandarlapaty || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Through the Lens of the Beatniks: Norman Mailer and Modern American Man’s Quest for Self-Realization|Through the Lens of the Beatniks]] || [[User:Maggiemrogers]] || {{yellow tick}}
|}

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Through the Lens of the Beatniks: Norman Mailer and Modern American Man’s Quest for Self-Realization

2025-04-06T21:28:13Z

Maggiemrogers: Created the article page and started remediation

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-06T17:23:34Z

Maggiemrogers: /* Remediation Submission */ new section

{{Talk header}}
[[/Archive 202504/]]

== Final edits ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Erhernandez}} well done! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. I removed your banner after making a few corrections. Please have a look over it and move on to the next thing. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:06, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::@Grlucas, I have tried correcting the sfn codes in my citations. I was able to get the 2 web citations to link correctly. But for some reason, I cannot get the Mailer 1967 film Wild 90 citation to link to the reference list. Please advise. [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} OK, all fixed and published. Thanks. Please move on to another remediation. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:46, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} a stellar job. Well done. I removed the banner, so you can move on to another article. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:12, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} Well done! Banner removed, url added. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:18, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

==Oohh Normie Final Edits==
Hi Dr. Lucas, I have finished my article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/"Oohh_Normie_—_You're_Sooo_Hemingway":_Mailer_Memories_and_Encounters|Oohh Normie, You're Sooo Hemingway]]. Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. [[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 20:01, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Tbara4554}} thank you. I made some corrections and removed the banner. You might want to have another look over it. Please move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:53, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review. Thanks.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Harlot%27s_Ghost,_Bildungsroman,_Masculinity_and_Hemingway

[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 21:22, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} excellent. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:39, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== I am done with this ==

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Situating_Hemingway:_Mailer,_Style,_Ethics
:Received. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:29, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Review PM Article ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|here]] is my remediated article, ready for review![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 12:21, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have finished my remedidation project and I am ready for it to be reviewed. '''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]

Thanks,

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 13:04, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Submission ==

Hello!
Here's my remediated article; [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Devil's_Party:_Reading_and_Wreaking_Vengeance_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest|The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in ''The Castle in the Forest'']].
Thanks! Please let me know if there's anything I can review or correct.
[[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 13:23, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in The Castle in the Forest

2025-04-06T17:17:12Z

Maggiemrogers: Correction on citations

{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Working}} 

{{Byline|last=Peczenik|first=Fannie|abstract=A close reading of the importance of place in Mailer’s last novel.}}
{{cquote|You don’t know what it is to have six million of your people killed when there are only twelve million of them on earth. You don’t know the profound and fundamental stunting of existence that got into the blood cells of every Jew after Hitler had done his work.|author={{NM}} |source= Letter to Jack Abbott, 18 April 1979{{sfn|Mailer|2009}}}}

When I heard that Mailer had written a fictional biography of Hitler, I made up my mind not to read it. The idea was offensive. At this late date, the life of Adolf Hitler did not merit another examination, least of all in a novel, which would entail an imaginative engagement with the Führer’s private fears, desires, hopes, and dreams. Who wanted to spend time in close communion with that repellent psyche? Not I. Born in post-war Vienna to parents who were Holocaust survivors from Poland, I could say that I had already shared far too much of my life with Hitler.

Distaste is one thing, curiosity another. And I was just curious enough about ''Castle in the Forest'' to read J. M. Coetzee’s essay in the ''New York Review''. A review seemed like a good compromise: appraisal and analysis instead of direct contact. But as it turned out, Coetzee made such a strong argument for the seriousness of the enterprise that I reconsidered my opinion. The novel might have some merit after all. Yet I was in no hurry to read it. Months passed, and then one early spring day, as my husband and I were {{pg|304|305}}strolling through a bookstore, he picked a copy of ''Castle in the Forest'' off a shelf. “Here,” he said, “I’ll get this for you. It’s a Purim gift.”

This autobiographical vignette serves a purpose: there was uncanny pre- science in linking Purim to ''Castle in the Forest''. The holiday celebrates the salvation of the Persian Jews in the Fifth Century BCE from a plot by Haman, the king’s evil advisor, to have the entire community slaughtered. The Book of Esther tells how, with the help of her kinsman Mordechai, she uses her wits and her beauty to foil Haman’s plans. By the king’s decree, victors and victims undergo a swift reversal of fortune. Haman’s plot recoils back on him and he ends up on the very same gallows he had prepared for Mordechai. Meanwhile, the Jews of the realm, permitted to arm themselves, attack and kill Haman’s followers. For the Jews, sorrow is turned to joy and a day of mourning to a festival.

The only boisterous holiday in the Hebrew calendar, Purim is not unlike Carnival in using masks and costumes and giving license to rowdy behavior. That the history of the Jews is replete with other plots against them that do not end so well does not diminish the festivity of Purim; perhaps it only increases it. Through the feasting and merrymaking, the retribution against Haman is reenacted as mockery. Most Americans in urban areas are probably familiar with the special Purim pastries, poppy seed or fruit-filled triangular tarts called ''hamantaschen'', Haman’s pockets, made popular by Eastern European Jewish immigrants. In the synagogue, the holiday is celebrated by a public reading of the Scroll (Megillah) of Esther, during which the congregation deploys noisemakers (called ''greggers'' in Yiddish) to drown out the name of Haman whenever it is said aloud in the reading of the text. As the Hebrew curse has it, Haman’s name is blotted out —
except to denote pastry. Among Ashkenazi Jews, the festivities traditionally included a ''Purim-shpil'', a folk play based on the Purim story or contemporary subjects.{{efn|For a study of the reception of a Purim-shpil performed in the aftermath of World War II, see Aronowicz.{{sfn|Aronowicz|2008}} For a general discussion of the Yiddish folk dramas performed at Purim, see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett{{sfn|Kirshenblatt-Gimblett|1980}} and “''Purim-Shpil'',”{{sfn|Purim-Shpil|2007}} ''Encyclopaedia Judaica''.}} Crossing genre borders, I now propose to read ''Castle'' as a type of Purim entertainment, a ''shpil'' in long prose narrative form that carries the heavy burden of invoking not a catastrophe averted but a catastrophe perpetrated.

First, a disclaimer is in order. ''Castle'' can be read in the context of the retributive charivari of Purim without exaggerating the novel’s Jewish dimensions or Mailer’s engagement with Judaism.{{efn|For various and valuable insights into Mailer’s role as a Jewish writer, see Bernstein,{{sfn|Bernstein|2007}} Cappell,{{sfn|Cappell|2007}} and Siegel.{{sfn|Siegel|2007}}}} In fact, it is instructive to consider ''Castle'' in the light of a very different tradition, what one might call the ''locus classicus'' of retributive justice in Western literature, Canto 28 of Dante’s ''Inferno''. There the pilgrim-poet encounters Bertran de Born who, {{pg|305|306}}having severed filial ties between a father and son, is condemned to carry his own severed head. Holding the head by the hair and swinging it like a lantern, Bertran offers a gloss on his gruesome condition: "''Così s’osserva in me lo contrapasso''" (In me you may observe fit punishment). {{efn|Dante, ''Inferno'', 142.{{sfn|Dante Alighieri|2000|p=142}} For explication and sources, see the commentary to 28. 142 in Hollander, ''Princeton Dante Project''.{{sfn|Hollander|Robert|p=142}}}} While scholars disagree on the extent to which the penal code of hell is based the principle of ''contrapasso'', it clearly underlies the punishment of Ugolino and Ruggieri in Canto 33.{{efn|For a comprehensive summary of the issues involved in determining whether all the condemned souls receive condign punishment, see Armour.{{sfn|Armour|2000}}}} Recounting how in life he and his sons were imprisoned by Ruggieri and left to starve, Ugolino implies that hunger drove him to cannibalize his children. So now in hell he is condemned to gnaw forever on the head of Ruggieri; the punishment is superbly efficient, at once echoing the crime and exacting vengeance for it. Dante’s ''contrapasso'', his vision of the precise and punctilious infernal justice of retribution, informs the ''Purim-shpil'' extravagance of ''Castle''. Mailer’s close examination of Hitler’s life—the bibliography appended to the novel is extensive—puts mockery in the service of strict accounting, the measure for measure of condign punishment.

For fifty years he had been waiting to write about Hitler, Mailer said in an interview.{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}} During that time, as the Third Reich has been examined and reexamined and incorporated into popular culture, Hitler has become, for the general population, more a figure of speech than a historical reality. The psychic havoc (Mailer’s term in ''Advertisements for Myself'' ) caused by the Second World War has morphed into cliché with the concomitant psychic pall, and the condition extends well beyond the Jewish community. So as the historical Hitler dominated most of Europe and caused the deaths of millions, the figurative Hitler still has the power to thwart discourse—mention his name and it kills the conversation.{{efn|For a concise exposition of still unanswered questions about Hitler’s regime, see Lukacs,{{sfn|Lukacs|2010}} especially 86–108.}} And in the bleak confusion and bold incompetence of American political life at the beginning of the twenty-first century, that name was invoked with alarming frequency (deployed, curiously enough, by both ends of the political spectrum).

Taking on the trope of Hitler, the aging Mailer returns to the prophetic mode of his younger self, who believed his vocation lay in becoming “''consecutively more disruptive, more dangerous, and more powerful.''”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=22}} He remains a disruptive writer, making his readers uncomfortable. But ever the great experimentalist of the narrative voice, he chooses now to speak with the mellow cadences of folktale, telling how ''das Waldschloss'', the castle in the forest, came to be where there was neither cas-{{pg|306|307}}tle nor forest, but only the adamantine irony of inmates from Berlin imprisoned in a concentration camp where there had once been a potato field. We do not learn about this ''Waldschloss'' until the end of the novel, when we have already passed through the other adamantine irony of a tale told to avenge crimes committed more than sixty years before. The long delay has its advantage. As we know from an old adage invoked in Mailer’s ''Harlot’s Ghost'': “OSS working undercover in Italy, 1943, did encounter the following piece of Sicilian wisdom: ‘Revenge is a dish that people of taste eat cold.’” {{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=813}} The time is ripe for low temperature retribution.

Mailer’s instrument of revenge is the novel’s first person narrator, the gregarious, ingratiating, and ambitious devil, incarnated as Dieter the S.S. Officer (renamed D.T. during his residence in America—but of that sojourn we are told very little), who played a leading role in fostering, encouraging, and fashioning Hitler. While his boss, the Evil One, or Maestro, has turned his attention to modern technology, Dieter takes the opportunity to avenge a demotion by betraying the covert demonic organization that employed him and reveal how a boy born to an obscure Austrian peasant family became his most famous client. Barbara Probst Solomon has noted that, deliberately or not, in ''The Castle in the Forest'' Mailer “has turned the tables on Hitler. Hitler’s demonic portrait of the Jews, his obsession with their bloodlines, their presumed inherited characteristics, had to be ingested from sources close to him. And Mailer hunts down Adi’s family with the same obsessiveness and belief in inherited characteristics that Hitler did to the Jews.”{{sfn|Solomon|2007|p=225}} Going far beyond subjecting the Hitler family to intense scrutiny, Mailer has contrived to give them an antagonistic writer of an unauthorized biography, a Kitty Kelley gone wild, or—the temptation to say this is irresistible—the biographer from hell. And so Dieter is.

Even earnest biographers run the risk of appropriating the lives of their subjects. For Dieter appropriation is the goal, as we learn from his teasing discussion of the narrative’s genre: “It is more than a memoir and certainly has to be most curious as a biography since it is as privileged as a novel.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=79}} He may argue against the common belief that demonic possession is total but he can also boast of his mastery of the subject: “I live with the confidence that I am in a position to understand Adolf. For the fact is that I know him. I must repeat. I know him top to bottom.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=9}} On the basis of his successful cultivation of Hitler as a client of the Maestro, Dieter rose through the ranks of the infernal hierarchy, and in telling the story afterwards, the de-{{pg|307|308}}moted (can we call him fallen?) devil is not about to give up his rights to the life of a celebrity. Hitler is still Dieter’s intellectual property, one might say, but the vengeance is only incidentally his. Primarily it is ours.

Dieter’s knowledge of his client is indeed extensive. He generously offers readers copious data accessible only to devils (and novelists) about Hitler’s incestuous genealogy, odious conception, and bullied and bullying childhood. He takes pains to describe the workings of infernal plots and ploys to intervene in human life. Yet nothing about the information he imparts tells us why Hitler turned out as he did—why a dysfunctional family, nasty sibling rivalry, and a failed beekeeping venture, unpleasant as they are, should lead to dictatorship, world war, and genocide. For not providing an explanation for Hitler’s evil, Mailer was criticized by some reviewers (Gross, for example).{{sfn|Gross|2007|p=59+}} They missed the point, I believe. Such criticism presupposes that ''Castle'' should have offered the kind of catharsis-through-information that one finds in murder mysteries. Yet if we knew what caused Hitler to do what he did, would his deeds suddenly become less horrific?{{efn|For an interesting perspective on the impossibility of establishing causal relations in ''Castle'' and elsewhere, see Fleming.{{sfn|Fleming|2008}}}} It is worth noting that even in ''The Executioner’s Song'', where Mailer is dealing with a mundane criminal, there is also no catharsis-through-information. We wait for Gary Gilmore to explain his motive, to say why he murdered the two men he robbed. But he never does.

As though anticipating the objections of his critics, Mailer has Dieter tease us with details whose later historical echo is unmistakable. Relating how Alois Hitler’s beekeeping mentor, der Alte, set fire to one of his hives, Dieter casually mentions that the young Adi happened to be present but takes care to describe the boy’s sadistic excitement: “His toes tingled, his heart shook in its chamber, he did not know whether to scream or to roar with laughter.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=263}} Since der Alte burns the hive in obedience to instructions sent to him in a dream by the very same Dieter and the boy likewise has been instructed by dream to be at the old man’s farm, can we conclude that this is a formative moment? The devil demurs with a shrug. He had just come back from creating mayhem in Russia, he tells us, and he was not up to the task of dealing with the mind of this particular six-year old (the six-year old who interests us more than the entire Russian royal family). If we were expecting to derive some intellectual or emotional satisfaction from that proffered datum about the young Hitler’s fascination with fiery death and mass slaughter, we are disappointed. Dieter denies us the pleasure.

A balder instance is the large ''Hakenkreuz'' carved into the gate of the {{pg|308|309}}monastery school the young Adi attends. At this point the swastika is not yet an abhorrent political symbol; it is merely the coat of arms of an Abbot von Hagen who may have enjoyed the punning allusion to his name. The gate is the scene of an episode in which the nine-year-old Hitler, caught smoking by one of his teachers who happens to be an important client of the infernal powers, has a chance to hone his skills in manipulation and gives up the idea of becoming a priest. Yet as soon as Dieter brings the tantalizing description of the school archway to our attention, he warns us against rushing to conclusions: “Not too much, I hasten to add, should be made of this. Von Hagen’s swastika was subtly carved, and so offered no striking suggestion of the phalanxes yet to march beneath that symbol. Nonetheless, there it was, a crooked cross.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=341-42}} The carving is and is not significant; it does and does not foreshadow the goose-stepping hordes.

Although Dieter has a pronounced impish edge, he does not dangle provocative details before his readers merely to amuse himself at their expense. Ambiguity comes with the secret agent’s territory. The nature of his work requires him to move from one blind stratagem to another, rely on sources of varying credibility, and grasp the opportunities that come with occasional bits of good luck. The outcome is always unpredictable and always obscure; cause and effect are blurred.

The infernal organization to which Dieter belongs is, after all, a literary descendant of the CIA in ''Harlot’s Ghost'', and it is instructive to remember Harry Hubbard’s limited knowledge about the Company (as the agents call their organization) and its manifold machinations against its ostensible enemy, the KGB. Applying the same kind of intellectual limitations to his private life, Hubbard remains unaware of the state of his own floundering marriage. Wandering for decades in a maze of disguises, disinformation, cryptonyms, letters, messages, and fragments of poetry, he finally tries to extricate himself by writing a memoir in two disjointed manuscripts, Alpha and Omega (the other twenty-two letters of the Greek alphabet coming between them, it is unlikely the two parts will ever fit together). Hubbard’s hapless ignorance is institution-wide. Hugh Montague may be the master of literary cryptograms, but his monologue after the Kennedy assassination reveals (in a moment of black humor) his true ignorance as he tries to cover his tracks without knowing precisely where his tracks are. His desperate self-vindication is worthy of one of Robert Browning’s soliloquizing madmen. Always more vulnerable than his superior, Harry even worries that {{pg|309|310}}through the convoluted webs of intrigue he has set in motion, he himself might ultimately be culpable.{{efn|For the “radical indeterminacy” of ''Harlot’s Ghost'', see Anshen, 457.{{sfn|Anshen|2008|p=457}}}}

A supernatural veneer is, evidently, no protection against the ethos of ignorance inherent in covert agencies. Dieter is better informed than Harry only in that, Socratically, he knows how little he knows, admitting (while still status conscious): “I am about as much endowed beyond an accomplished scholar as he in turn is more knowledgeable than a clod from a poorly endowed school.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=236}} To the agent who must traverse the murky terrain of the human mind, that academic advantage counts for very little. And, again, like his human counterpart, Dieter is deliberately kept ignorant by his employer: “In truth, I do not know much about hell. I am not even certain it exists. The Maestro has kept us, after all, in enclaves. We are not supposed to know what we do not need to know.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=385}} Dieter must entertain the possibility that the Maestro is not even the Devil himself, but merely another one of the many infernal bureaucrats. Compartmentalization keeps the agents wandering in the labyrinth of their assigned enclaves.

Dieter is, then, no better than a CIA agent at charting his own success or foreseeing the future course of history (and perhaps the Maestro and his archenemy, the Dummkopf, are also limited in this respect). After the young Adi helps his father gas a hive of sick bees, the boy is sent a dream etching in which he is given an assignment to count the dead insects. Laying them out in rows, he takes pride in counting four thousand dead before the dream is interrupted. But again Dieter adds a caveat against hasty conclusions and reiterates the uncertainty of the outcome:
<blockquote>Here, I would warn the reader not to make too much of the gassing nor the body count. It is not to be understood as the unique cause of all that came later. For a dream-etching... leaves but a dot upon your psyche, a footprint to anticipate a future sequence of development that may or may not come to pass in future decades. Most dream-etchings are not unlike the abandoned foundations one can see on the outskirts of Third World cities. Left to molder for lack of further funds, they lie there, excavations on a scraggly field.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=201}}</blockquote>
As spies plant information and pay informants, so devils etch dreams, but not all of their schemes come to fruition. {{pg|310|311}}

Christopher Ricks has noted that in the descriptions of Alois Hitler’s attempts to become a beekeeper “there are glimpses of something that might have been other, a world of which one would not have had to despair.”{{sfn|Ricks|2007|p=208}} The beehives are a vision not only of a naturally thriving world but of a communal life otherwise unavailable to the Hitler family. Beyond Alois’s visits to the local tavern and, later, an occasional ''Bürgerabend'', there is only hearth and home, subject to frequent changes of address. One might be able to consider the beekeeping episodes as a kind of counterplot (as Geoffrey Hartman called that sense of an omnipresent divine providence protecting creation in ''Paradise Lost'', especially those redemptive images embedded in the pastoral similes in Books I and II) if, in the shadow of the Waldschloss, one could imagine good coming out of evil. But no, there is neither divine providence nor protection in this castle in this forest, even within the confines of a figure of speech.

If there is a counterplot in ''Castle'', it tends toward retribution, not redemption. By modeling the structure of the Maestro’s infernal organization on the CIA of ''Harlot’s Ghost'', Mailer has assured that Hitler will be denied centrality in his own life story. He will be groomed, honed, tricked out for whatever task his handler deems necessary; he will be scrupulously manipulated; but personally he will matter not at all. It is consistent with the nature of Dieter’s work that he should resist calling any episode in little Adi’s life formative. Intelligence work is like that—uncertain and inconclusive. Dieter’s caveats may give us, painfully, a glimpse of another world, one in which his schemes failed, but in our world, where they succeeded, the absence of formative experiences works towards the progressive diminution of Hitler. Very simply, if fashioning the Führer required hard demonic labor, then we can smile sarcastically along with Dieter as he listens to Himmler expound on Hitler’s superhuman Will and Vision and the rest of the pseudo- political, pseudo-philosophical notions dear to Nazi hearts. Superhuman Will and Vision? Dieter must think the mortals fools. Does Himmler have any idea how many demon-hours (evidently the infernal clocks are not set by eternity) were required to make all those dream etchings (and some of them went nowhere) in Hitler’s brain?

In that light, the coronation of Czar Nicholas II in Book VIII becomes a necessary detour away from rural Austria rather than a digression from Hitler’s biography. In St. Petersburg and at Khodynskoe, the Maestro’s agents are preparing the way for the Bolshevik Revolution and ultimately Stalin, {{pg|311|312}}and one need not indulge in alternative history to see how Hitler’s career depends on their success. The eastern assignment is evidently so important to the demonic designs that it boosts Dieter’s career: “I can vouch that the eight months I lived in Russia from late 1895 to the early summer of 1896 became a prominent element in my development as a high devil.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=213}} But—more diminution—as the reader well knows, Dieter’s Russian strategy also leads to the entry of the Red Army into Berlin and Hitler’s suicide and fiery end.

The diminution of Hitler does not depend solely on future events. In his capacity as biographer from hell, Dieter works against his subject from the beginning, cutting Hitler down to size even as he narrates his life story. Narcissistic and reflexively competitive, Dieter does not gladly share the spotlight with his young charge and his contempt is palpable. (We already know from ''Harlot’s Ghost'' that it is de rigueur for intelligence agents to despise the clients they cultivate). “I, too, am a protagonist,”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=213}} Dieter is quick to remind us. He presents his client as a boy devoid of any admirable qualities, except a talent for war games, the skill that damns him by bringing him to the attention of the Evil One. Otherwise Adi is an unappealing, fearful egotist enamored of power and brute force. Moreover, he suffers from that traditional affliction of the Evil One’s clients, a sulphurous smell. Every so often, Dieter reminds us that the little boy stinks; it is a gratuitous detail, mean and petty, but also funny. Adi is eventually shown to be completely loathsome in his jealousy (possibly murderous—Dieter hedges his bet here) towards his younger brother, the angelic Edmund whose death almost brings a smattering of human emotion to the demon. Compared with Adi, even Alois Senior and Junior, despite their crude appetites, cruelty, and violence, seem recognizably human.

If he demurs on the formative experiences in Adi’s life, Dieter is considerably less reluctant to disclose the requisite personality traits he nurtures in him. He begins by feeding the boy’s vanity, feeding it so well that every incident in his harsh, claustrophobic life is measured by an increase or decrease in his quantity of self-esteem. A stepbrother runs away from home, a brother dies, and Adi is chiefly concerned with his place in the family hierarchy, delighting when he becomes, first, the eldest son, then the only son. Through dreams, Dieter ensures that his young charge believes he has a special destiny, a belief completely contradicted by daytime evidence. The woozy nationalism of the late nineteenth century is seductive and, before long, the {{pg|312|313}}boy links his desperate and defiant sense of personal destiny to that of the ''Volk''. Following an adolescent outburst against both the prevailing prudery and his own sexual disgust, the young Hitler reads Treitschke in a school text and becomes mesmerized by a hyperbolic passage about the mystery and majesty of the German people. He barely understands the words but he is certain they are true. At this juncture, Dieter points menacingly toward the future: “We devils have known for a long time that a mediocre mind, once devoted to one mystical idea, can obtain a mental confidence well beyond its normal potential.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=447}} This is a contemptuous assessment from a biographer who thoroughly knows his subject—and a depressing thought, but true.

To complement his self-induced grandiosity, the young Hitler is schooled by Dieter in the fine art of data selection. When he receives failing grades at the Realschule, the boy convinces himself—with help from his handler—that his failure is actually a sign of intellectual superiority. In a compensatory fantasy, he envisions himself as a schoolteacher giving a lecture on the secret of true learning: “Do not try to remember all the facts of every historical event.... Most of the facts you have memorized are no better than debris which contradict other facts. So you will be in a state of confusion.... Select only those facts which clarify the issues.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=419}} This skill will obviously prove useful in Hitler’s later career. It is, incidentally, worth noting that here Mailer has slyly summarized a basic tool of bad governance, popular with a great many leaders besides Hitler. (One would very much like to know where D.T., the American incarnation of the narrating devil who was once Dieter, would have directed his attention on this side of the Atlantic. But those episodes belong to a subsequent volume that Mailer did not live to write.)

By the time of the ''Realschule'' failures, Dieter has already used Adi’s twin obsessions with primogeniture and patriarchy to prepare him for the apotheosis of data selection—a lifetime of mendacity. (Curiously enough, although he was once reviled by feminists, in ''The Castle in the Forest'' Mailer offers a stunningly cold dissection of patriarchy and its discontents.) When Alois Senior savagely attacks his eldest son, Dieter deploys his infernal machinations to make the terrified little Adi believe that he himself was the victim, and Hitler spends the rest of his life believing that his father almost beat him to death. Through the false memory, Dieter lays the groundwork for an entire edifice of lies: “this fiction would enable me to develop Adi’s future incapacity to tell the truth. By the time his political career began, he was in command of an artwork of lies elaborate enough to support his smallest {{pg|313|314}}need. He could shave the truth by a hair or subvert it altogether.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=316}} If it were any man but Hitler, the pathos of a bogus Oedipal struggle (a hated stepbrother acting as surrogate to confront the vengeful father where three roads meet) would merit pity.

Or, there would be pity, if the narrator were someone other than Dieter. Although he is an immensely entertaining story-teller, he ''is'' a devil, cut off from the full range of human experience, his emotional vocabulary accurate only when expressing combative, competitive egotism. It is useful here to remember how one of Dieter’s literary ancestors, Milton’s Satan, becomes so distracted by Eve’s beauty that for a moment he loses his hate and envy and stands there, abstracted from his usual evil, “Stupidly good.”{{sfn|Milton|1957|p=465}} Dumb passivity is as close as Satan gets to understanding Eden and prelapsarian experience; the local animals and even the plants have richer emotional lives than he does. For his part, Dieter is well-acquainted with envy, self-pity, ambition, lust, physical pain and pleasure. But compassion, longing, sorrow, remorse and love are unfamiliar to him, except in a reductive sense: “we do look for the lowest common denominator to any truth.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=99}}

Dieter’s truncated psyche gets him (that is, his S.S. officer incarnation) killed in the Waldschloss. As he tells it, the Jewish psychiatrist who interrogates him is upset by the pestilential effluvia and the shouts of the liberated prisoners and seeks out Dieter’s company because they are both high-ranking officers. Dieter must have engaged in some extremely obtuse data selection because he has egregiously misjudged the situation. The American has just encountered immeasurably greater horrors than a few bad smells and as a Jew is probably taking the horrors personally. But empathy is so alien to Dieter that he makes the fatal mistake of pretending to be conscience-stricken. (An argument could be made that Dieter is clueless here because he has been wearing the S.S. uniform for so long that even the vestigial sensibilities of a demon have atrophied.) The sense that Dieter gets what he deserves is inescapable.

At that moment, we are abruptly reminded that Dieter is not an impartial narrator nor a reliable one, and we have been of (and at) the devil’s party, amusing ourselves as we watch the heartless education of a wretched little boy in the arts of lying and self-deception. In 1940, in ''The Great Dictator'', Charlie Chaplin imagined Hitler subsumed by a double, an anonymous Jewish barber. What Chaplin began before Hitler was fully yet the murderer he would be-{{pg|314|315}}come, Mailer completes after the fact. Hitler is subsumed by his biographer, the slick Dieter, good at schmoozing and imprinting his own image on his clients. Significantly, Dieter appropriates the soul of the young Hitler without temptation, without the flattery and bogus promises of wealth, power, knowledge, or beautiful women that are the stock-in-trade ploy of the devil. It is possible a temptation scene might have figured in a later episode in a subsequent volume, but that is idle speculation. In the novel as we have it, Dieter so overshadows his client that he effectively blots him out.

As we know from Aristotle, history merely tells us what happened, poetry what might have happened. There is reason to believe (or hope) that if what might have happened is well told enough, the way we perceive what happened changes. Isn’t Napoleon’s invasion of Russia forever defined by Tolstoy and World War I by Hemingway? Then there is a chance—the odds unknown—that some years hence, the popular view of Hitler will be shaped by Mailer’s novel. Hitler, the man of millennial urges who dominated the twentieth-century, reduced to a powerless stick figure—that would be exemplary ''contrapasso'', retributive justice meted out by literature, as though ''The Castle'' were a ''roman à clef'', albeit one written to redress historical rather than private grievances.

Meanwhile, for the present, does the novel-cum-''Purim-shpil'' change anything? If Mailer was correct in his letter to Jack Henry Abbot and my existence was stunted by Hitler, am I less stunted for having read ''Castle in the Forest''?

I resort to another autobiographical vignette.

Some months after my husband gave me ''Castle'' as a Purim gift, we were in a bookstore again, but not, as before, in a strip mall in Pittsburgh. This time we were in a shop near the chic Kärtnerstrasse, close to the street where I was born in Vienna. I had recently had a landmark birthday and it was my husband’s idea that we celebrate it there. After a lifetime of ambivalence about my natal city, I had hesitated. But since he had never really seen Vienna and it has the reputation of being one of the most livable cities in the world, I agreed to go.

On a table, among the new selections, was a stack of books entitled ''Das Schloss im Wald''. I picked up one of the books, thumbed through it, handed it to my husband. We exchanged sly glances. For my purposes, the timing of the German translation of ''The Castle in the Forest'' couldn’t have been more fortuitous.

A clerk was watching us. He had that wonderfully welcoming face that so {{pg|315|316}}many young Austrians have but I thought his expression implied more—a chance, perhaps, to discuss the new book with a couple of Americans.

The possibility of a literary chat was intriguing. Austria was late in addressing its Nazi past, but when it finally did, it undertook the work with commendable seriousness. I had just been to see the inverted blank concrete books of the Holocaust memorial on Judenplatz. It was, I thought, a solemn act of piety.

''“Nein, danke,”'' I shook my head and smiled at the young clerk. I didn’t need any help.

And I didn’t. I could forgo the chat. On the table in front of me I had everything I wanted. The desire for retribution is atavistic, unattractive, and yet undeniable. For the Austrians, concrete books, unwritten and unreadable, made a fit monument. But ''Das Schloss im Wald'', Mailer’s self-razing biography of Hitler, was fit for me.

Yes, Vienna was one of the most livable cities, as well as one of the prettiest. For the first time, I allowed myself to feel the familiar comfort of a childhood home and it was sweet, like ''hamantaschen''.

''I wish to thank Elemer Boreczky, Gloria Erlich, and Carol Holmes for their comments on this essay.''

=== Notes ===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|20em}}

===Works Cited===
{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}
* {{cite journal |last=Anshen |first=David |title=The New Politics of Form in ''Harlot's Ghost'' |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2 |issue=1 |date=2008 |pages=452-73 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Armour |first=Peter |date=2000 |chapter=Dante's ''Contrapasso'': Contexts and Texts |title= Italian Studies |volume=55 |pages=1-20 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Aronowicz |first=Annette |title=''Homens Mapole:'' Hope in the Immediate Postwar Period|url=https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/article/241585|journal=Jewish Quarterly Review |volume=98 |issue=3 |date=2008 |publisher=Project Muse |pages=355-88 |access-date=22 June 2010 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Bernstein |first=Mashey |title=In a Different Way, Norman Mailer Was a Deeply Jewish Writer |url=https://www.proquest.com/docview/194676510/533257E80CD3408CPQ/1?sourcetype=Magazines |journal=Deep South Jewish Voice |volume=18 |issue=1 |date=Dec 2007 |publisher=ProQuest |pages=100–101 |access-date=3 Mar 2009 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Cappell |first=Ezra |date=Nov 2007 |title=Norman Mailer: A Man of Letters Inspired by the People of the Book |url=https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/norman-mailer-man-letters-inspired-people-book/docview/367855341/se-2 |work=Forward |volume=16 |location= |publisher=ProQuest |page=A1 |access-date=3 Mar 2009 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Coetzee |first=J. M. |date=15 Feb 2007 |title=Portrait of the Monster as a Young Artist |magazine=New York Review of Books |volume=54 |issue=2 |pages=8–11 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dante Alighieri |date=2000 |title=Inferno |translator=Robert and Jean Hollander |location=New York |publisher=Doubleday |pages=142 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Fleming |first=James R. |title='But Where is the Castle?':The Function of Modernist Allegory in Norman Mailer's ''The Castle in the Forest'' |url= |journal=EAPSU Online |volume=5 |date=Fall 2008 |pages=143–55 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Gross |first=John |date=2007 |title="Young Adolf." Rev. of ''The Castle in the Forest.'' |url=https://www.commentary.org/articles/john-gross/the-castle-in-the-forest-by-norman-mailer/ |magazine=Commentary |volume=123 |issue=3 |location=Expanded Academic ASAP |page=59+ |access-date=23 Apr 2010 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Hartman |first=Geoffrey |title=Milton's Counterplot |journal=ELH |volume=28 |issue=1 |date=1958 |pages=1-12 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite web |url=https://etcweb.princeton.edu/ |title=Princeton Dante Project |last1=Hollander |last2=Robert |display-authors=etal |access-date=25 Feb 2010 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kirshenblatt-Gimblett |first=Barbara |date=1980 |title=Contraband: Performance, Text and Analysis of a ''Purim-shpil'' |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/i247940 |journal=Drama Review |volume=24 |issue=3 |publisher=JSTOR |pages=5-16 |doi= |access-date=17 Jan 2009 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lukacs |first=John |date=2010 |title=The Legacy of the Second World War |location=New Haven |publisher=Yale University Press |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |location=New York |publisher=Putnam |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1991 |title=Harlot’s Ghost |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}
* {{cite web |title=Interview by Michael Lennon |url=https://www.bookreporter.com/authors/au-mailer-norman.asp |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |last2=Lennon |first2=Michael |date=23 Feb 2007 |website=Bookreporter.com |publisher= |access-date=3 Mar 2009 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |title=Norman Mailer: Letters to Jack Abbott |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/03/12/norman-mailer-letters-to-jack-abbott/ |journal=New York Review of Books ||volume=56 |issue=4 |date=12 March 2009 |pages=n. pag. |access-date=7 Aug 2010 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Milton |first=John |date=1957 |title=Paradise Lost. Complete Poems and Major Prose |editor-last1=Hughes |editor-first1=Merritt |location=New York |publisher=Odyssey Press |pages=173–469 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite encyclopedia |date=2007 |title=Purim-Shpil |encyclopedia=Encyclopaedia Judaica |edition=2nd |ref= {{harvid|Purim-Shpil|2007}} }}
* {{cite journal |last=Ricks |first=Christopher |title=The Devil Only Knows |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |date=2007 |pages=206–214 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Siegel |first=Lee |date=21 Jan 2007 |title=Maestro of the Human Ego. Rev. of ''The Castle in the Forest'', by Norman Mailer |url= https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/books/review/Siegel.t.html |work=New York Times |publisher=New York Times |access-date=22 Apr 2010 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Solomon |first=Barbara Probst |title=Mailer’s Choice |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |date=2007 |pages=223–28 |ref=harv }}
{{refend}}

{{Review|state=expanded}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengence in ''The Castle in the Forrest'', The}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

User:Maggiemrogers/sandbox

2025-04-06T17:16:20Z

Maggiemrogers:

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in The Castle in the Forest

2025-04-06T16:33:36Z

Maggiemrogers:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Working}} 

{{Byline|last=Peczenik|first=Fannie|abstract=A close reading of the importance of place in Mailer’s last novel.}}
{{cquote|You don’t know what it is to have six million of your people killed when there are only twelve million of them on earth. You don’t know the profound and fundamental stunting of existence that got into the blood cells of every Jew after Hitler had done his work.|author={{NM}} |source= Letter to Jack Abbott, 18 April 1979{{sfn|Mailer|2009}}}}

When I heard that Mailer had written a fictional biography of Hitler, I made up my mind not to read it. The idea was offensive. At this late date, the life of Adolf Hitler did not merit another examination, least of all in a novel, which would entail an imaginative engagement with the Führer’s private fears, desires, hopes, and dreams. Who wanted to spend time in close communion with that repellent psyche? Not I. Born in post-war Vienna to parents who were Holocaust survivors from Poland, I could say that I had already shared far too much of my life with Hitler.

Distaste is one thing, curiosity another. And I was just curious enough about ''Castle in the Forest'' to read J. M. Coetzee’s essay in the ''New York Review''. A review seemed like a good compromise: appraisal and analysis instead of direct contact. But as it turned out, Coetzee made such a strong argument for the seriousness of the enterprise that I reconsidered my opinion. The novel might have some merit after all. Yet I was in no hurry to read it. Months passed, and then one early spring day, as my husband and I were {{pg|304|305}}strolling through a bookstore, he picked a copy of ''Castle in the Forest'' off a shelf. “Here,” he said, “I’ll get this for you. It’s a Purim gift.”

This autobiographical vignette serves a purpose: there was uncanny pre- science in linking Purim to ''Castle in the Forest''. The holiday celebrates the salvation of the Persian Jews in the Fifth Century BCE from a plot by Haman, the king’s evil advisor, to have the entire community slaughtered. The Book of Esther tells how, with the help of her kinsman Mordechai, she uses her wits and her beauty to foil Haman’s plans. By the king’s decree, victors and victims undergo a swift reversal of fortune. Haman’s plot recoils back on him and he ends up on the very same gallows he had prepared for Mordechai. Meanwhile, the Jews of the realm, permitted to arm themselves, attack and kill Haman’s followers. For the Jews, sorrow is turned to joy and a day of mourning to a festival.

The only boisterous holiday in the Hebrew calendar, Purim is not unlike Carnival in using masks and costumes and giving license to rowdy behavior. That the history of the Jews is replete with other plots against them that do not end so well does not diminish the festivity of Purim; perhaps it only increases it. Through the feasting and merrymaking, the retribution against Haman is reenacted as mockery. Most Americans in urban areas are probably familiar with the special Purim pastries, poppy seed or fruit-filled triangular tarts called ''hamantaschen'', Haman’s pockets, made popular by Eastern European Jewish immigrants. In the synagogue, the holiday is celebrated by a public reading of the Scroll (Megillah) of Esther, during which the congregation deploys noisemakers (called ''greggers'' in Yiddish) to drown out the name of Haman whenever it is said aloud in the reading of the text. As the Hebrew curse has it, Haman’s name is blotted out —
except to denote pastry. Among Ashkenazi Jews, the festivities traditionally included a ''Purim-shpil'', a folk play based on the Purim story or contemporary subjects.{{efn|For a study of the reception of a Purim-shpil performed in the aftermath of World War II, see Aronowicz.{{sfn|Aronwicz|2008}} For a general discussion of the Yiddish folk dramas performed at Purim, see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett{{sfn|Kirshenblatt-Gimblett|1980}} and “''Purim-Shpil'',” ''Encyclopaedia Judaica''.{{sfn|Purim-Shpil|2007}}}} Crossing genre borders, I now propose to read ''Castle'' as a type of Purim entertainment, a ''shpil'' in long prose narrative form that carries the heavy burden of invoking not a catastrophe averted but a catastrophe perpetrated.

First, a disclaimer is in order. ''Castle'' can be read in the context of the retributive charivari of Purim without exaggerating the novel’s Jewish dimensions or Mailer’s engagement with Judaism.{{efn|For various and valuable insights into Mailer’s role as a Jewish writer, see Bernstein,{{sfn|Bernstein|2007}} Cappell,{{sfn|Cappell|2007}} and Siegel.{{sfn|Siegel|2007}}}} In fact, it is instructive to consider ''Castle'' in the light of a very different tradition, what one might call the ''locus classicus'' of retributive justice in Western literature, Canto 28 of Dante’s ''Inferno''. There the pilgrim-poet encounters Bertran de Born who, {{pg|305|306}}having severed filial ties between a father and son, is condemned to carry his own severed head. Holding the head by the hair and swinging it like a lantern, Bertran offers a gloss on his gruesome condition: "''Così s’osserva in me lo contrapasso''" (In me you may observe fit punishment). {{efn|Dante, ''Inferno'', 142.{{sfn|Dante Aligieri|2000|p=142}} For explication and sources, see the commentary to 28. 142 in Hollander, ''Princeton Dante Project''.{{sfn|Hollander|2010|p=142}}}} While scholars disagree on the extent to which the penal code of hell is based the principle of ''contrapasso'', it clearly underlies the punishment of Ugolino and Ruggieri in Canto 33.{{efn|For a comprehensive summary of the issues involved in determining whether all the condemned souls receive condign punishment, see Armour.{{sfn|Armour|2000}}}} Recounting how in life he and his sons were imprisoned by Ruggieri and left to starve, Ugolino implies that hunger drove him to cannibalize his children. So now in hell he is condemned to gnaw forever on the head of Ruggieri; the punishment is superbly efficient, at once echoing the crime and exacting vengeance for it. Dante’s ''contrapasso'', his vision of the precise and punctilious infernal justice of retribution, informs the ''Purim-shpil'' extravagance of ''Castle''. Mailer’s close examination of Hitler’s life—the bibliography appended to the novel is extensive—puts mockery in the service of strict accounting, the measure for measure of condign punishment.

For fifty years he had been waiting to write about Hitler, Mailer said in an interview.{{sfn|Mailer|23 Feb 2007}} During that time, as the Third Reich has been examined and reexamined and incorporated into popular culture, Hitler has become, for the general population, more a figure of speech than a historical reality. The psychic havoc (Mailer’s term in ''Advertisements for Myself'' ) caused by the Second World War has morphed into cliché with the concomitant psychic pall, and the condition extends well beyond the Jewish community. So as the historical Hitler dominated most of Europe and caused the deaths of millions, the figurative Hitler still has the power to thwart discourse—mention his name and it kills the conversation.{{efn|For a concise exposition of still unanswered questions about Hitler’s regime, see Lukacs,{{sfn|Lukacs|2010}} especially 86–108.}} And in the bleak confusion and bold incompetence of American political life at the beginning of the twenty-first century, that name was invoked with alarming frequency (deployed, curiously enough, by both ends of the political spectrum).

Taking on the trope of Hitler, the aging Mailer returns to the prophetic mode of his younger self, who believed his vocation lay in becoming “''consecutively more disruptive, more dangerous, and more powerful.''”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=22}} He remains a disruptive writer, making his readers uncomfortable. But ever the great experimentalist of the narrative voice, he chooses now to speak with the mellow cadences of folktale, telling how ''das Waldschloss'', the castle in the forest, came to be where there was neither cas-{{pg|306|307}}tle nor forest, but only the adamantine irony of inmates from Berlin imprisoned in a concentration camp where there had once been a potato field. We do not learn about this ''Waldschloss'' until the end of the novel, when we have already passed through the other adamantine irony of a tale told to avenge crimes committed more than sixty years before. The long delay has its advantage. As we know from an old adage invoked in Mailer’s ''Harlot’s Ghost'': “OSS working undercover in Italy, 1943, did encounter the following piece of Sicilian wisdom: ‘Revenge is a dish that people of taste eat cold.’” {{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=813}} The time is ripe for low temperature retribution.

Mailer’s instrument of revenge is the novel’s first person narrator, the gregarious, ingratiating, and ambitious devil, incarnated as Dieter the S.S. Officer (renamed D.T. during his residence in America—but of that sojourn we are told very little), who played a leading role in fostering, encouraging, and fashioning Hitler. While his boss, the Evil One, or Maestro, has turned his attention to modern technology, Dieter takes the opportunity to avenge a demotion by betraying the covert demonic organization that employed him and reveal how a boy born to an obscure Austrian peasant family became his most famous client. Barbara Probst Solomon has noted that, deliberately or not, in ''The Castle in the Forest'' Mailer “has turned the tables on Hitler. Hitler’s demonic portrait of the Jews, his obsession with their bloodlines, their presumed inherited characteristics, had to be ingested from sources close to him. And Mailer hunts down Adi’s family with the same obsessiveness and belief in inherited characteristics that Hitler did to the Jews.”{{sfn|Solomon|2007|p=225}} Going far beyond subjecting the Hitler family to intense scrutiny, Mailer has contrived to give them an antagonistic writer of an unauthorized biography, a Kitty Kelley gone wild, or—the temptation to say this is irresistible—the biographer from hell. And so Dieter is.

Even earnest biographers run the risk of appropriating the lives of their subjects. For Dieter appropriation is the goal, as we learn from his teasing discussion of the narrative’s genre: “It is more than a memoir and certainly has to be most curious as a biography since it is as privileged as a novel.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=79}} He may argue against the common belief that demonic possession is total but he can also boast of his mastery of the subject: “I live with the confidence that I am in a position to understand Adolf. For the fact is that I know him. I must repeat. I know him top to bottom.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=9}} On the basis of his successful cultivation of Hitler as a client of the Maestro, Dieter rose through the ranks of the infernal hierarchy, and in telling the story afterwards, the de-{{pg|307|308}}moted (can we call him fallen?) devil is not about to give up his rights to the life of a celebrity. Hitler is still Dieter’s intellectual property, one might say, but the vengeance is only incidentally his. Primarily it is ours.

Dieter’s knowledge of his client is indeed extensive. He generously offers readers copious data accessible only to devils (and novelists) about Hitler’s incestuous genealogy, odious conception, and bullied and bullying childhood. He takes pains to describe the workings of infernal plots and ploys to intervene in human life. Yet nothing about the information he imparts tells us why Hitler turned out as he did—why a dysfunctional family, nasty sibling rivalry, and a failed beekeeping venture, unpleasant as they are, should lead to dictatorship, world war, and genocide. For not providing an explanation for Hitler’s evil, Mailer was criticized by some reviewers (Gross, for example).{{sfn|Gross|2007|p=59+}} They missed the point, I believe. Such criticism presupposes that ''Castle'' should have offered the kind of catharsis-through-information that one finds in murder mysteries. Yet if we knew what caused Hitler to do what he did, would his deeds suddenly become less horrific?{{efn|For an interesting perspective on the impossibility of establishing causal relations in ''Castle'' and elsewhere, see Fleming.{{sfn|Flemming|2008}}}} It is worth noting that even in ''The Executioner’s Song'', where Mailer is dealing with a mundane criminal, there is also no catharsis-through-information. We wait for Gary Gilmore to explain his motive, to say why he murdered the two men he robbed. But he never does.

As though anticipating the objections of his critics, Mailer has Dieter tease us with details whose later historical echo is unmistakable. Relating how Alois Hitler’s beekeeping mentor, der Alte, set fire to one of his hives, Dieter casually mentions that the young Adi happened to be present but takes care to describe the boy’s sadistic excitement: “His toes tingled, his heart shook in its chamber, he did not know whether to scream or to roar with laughter.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=263}} Since der Alte burns the hive in obedience to instructions sent to him in a dream by the very same Dieter and the boy likewise has been instructed by dream to be at the old man’s farm, can we conclude that this is a formative moment? The devil demurs with a shrug. He had just come back from creating mayhem in Russia, he tells us, and he was not up to the task of dealing with the mind of this particular six-year old (the six-year old who interests us more than the entire Russian royal family). If we were expecting to derive some intellectual or emotional satisfaction from that proffered datum about the young Hitler’s fascination with fiery death and mass slaughter, we are disappointed. Dieter denies us the pleasure.

A balder instance is the large ''Hakenkreuz'' carved into the gate of the {{pg|308|309}}monastery school the young Adi attends. At this point the swastika is not yet an abhorrent political symbol; it is merely the coat of arms of an Abbot von Hagen who may have enjoyed the punning allusion to his name. The gate is the scene of an episode in which the nine-year-old Hitler, caught smoking by one of his teachers who happens to be an important client of the infernal powers, has a chance to hone his skills in manipulation and gives up the idea of becoming a priest. Yet as soon as Dieter brings the tantalizing description of the school archway to our attention, he warns us against rushing to conclusions: “Not too much, I hasten to add, should be made of this. Von Hagen’s swastika was subtly carved, and so offered no striking suggestion of the phalanxes yet to march beneath that symbol. Nonetheless, there it was, a crooked cross.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=341-42}} The carving is and is not significant; it does and does not foreshadow the goose-stepping hordes.

Although Dieter has a pronounced impish edge, he does not dangle provocative details before his readers merely to amuse himself at their expense. Ambiguity comes with the secret agent’s territory. The nature of his work requires him to move from one blind stratagem to another, rely on sources of varying credibility, and grasp the opportunities that come with occasional bits of good luck. The outcome is always unpredictable and always obscure; cause and effect are blurred.

The infernal organization to which Dieter belongs is, after all, a literary descendant of the CIA in ''Harlot’s Ghost'', and it is instructive to remember Harry Hubbard’s limited knowledge about the Company (as the agents call their organization) and its manifold machinations against its ostensible enemy, the KGB. Applying the same kind of intellectual limitations to his private life, Hubbard remains unaware of the state of his own floundering marriage. Wandering for decades in a maze of disguises, disinformation, cryptonyms, letters, messages, and fragments of poetry, he finally tries to extricate himself by writing a memoir in two disjointed manuscripts, Alpha and Omega (the other twenty-two letters of the Greek alphabet coming between them, it is unlikely the two parts will ever fit together). Hubbard’s hapless ignorance is institution-wide. Hugh Montague may be the master of literary cryptograms, but his monologue after the Kennedy assassination reveals (in a moment of black humor) his true ignorance as he tries to cover his tracks without knowing precisely where his tracks are. His desperate self-vindication is worthy of one of Robert Browning’s soliloquizing madmen. Always more vulnerable than his superior, Harry even worries that {{pg|309|310}}through the convoluted webs of intrigue he has set in motion, he himself might ultimately be culpable.{{efn|For the “radical indeterminacy” of ''Harlot’s Ghost'', see Anshen, 457.{{sfn|Anshen|2008|p=457}}}}

A supernatural veneer is, evidently, no protection against the ethos of ignorance inherent in covert agencies. Dieter is better informed than Harry only in that, Socratically, he knows how little he knows, admitting (while still status conscious): “I am about as much endowed beyond an accomplished scholar as he in turn is more knowledgeable than a clod from a poorly endowed school.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=236}} To the agent who must traverse the murky terrain of the human mind, that academic advantage counts for very little. And, again, like his human counterpart, Dieter is deliberately kept ignorant by his employer: “In truth, I do not know much about hell. I am not even certain it exists. The Maestro has kept us, after all, in enclaves. We are not supposed to know what we do not need to know.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=385}} Dieter must entertain the possibility that the Maestro is not even the Devil himself, but merely another one of the many infernal bureaucrats. Compartmentalization keeps the agents wandering in the labyrinth of their assigned enclaves.

Dieter is, then, no better than a CIA agent at charting his own success or foreseeing the future course of history (and perhaps the Maestro and his archenemy, the Dummkopf, are also limited in this respect). After the young Adi helps his father gas a hive of sick bees, the boy is sent a dream etching in which he is given an assignment to count the dead insects. Laying them out in rows, he takes pride in counting four thousand dead before the dream is interrupted. But again Dieter adds a caveat against hasty conclusions and reiterates the uncertainty of the outcome:
<blockquote>Here, I would warn the reader not to make too much of the gassing nor the body count. It is not to be understood as the unique cause of all that came later. For a dream-etching... leaves but a dot upon your psyche, a footprint to anticipate a future sequence of development that may or may not come to pass in future decades. Most dream-etchings are not unlike the abandoned foundations one can see on the outskirts of Third World cities. Left to molder for lack of further funds, they lie there, excavations on a scraggly field.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=201}}</blockquote>
As spies plant information and pay informants, so devils etch dreams, but not all of their schemes come to fruition. {{pg|310|311}}

Christopher Ricks has noted that in the descriptions of Alois Hitler’s attempts to become a beekeeper “there are glimpses of something that might have been other, a world of which one would not have had to despair.”{{sfn|Ricks|2007|p=208}} The beehives are a vision not only of a naturally thriving world but of a communal life otherwise unavailable to the Hitler family. Beyond Alois’s visits to the local tavern and, later, an occasional ''Bürgerabend'', there is only hearth and home, subject to frequent changes of address. One might be able to consider the beekeeping episodes as a kind of counterplot (as Geoffrey Hartman called that sense of an omnipresent divine providence protecting creation in ''Paradise Lost'', especially those redemptive images embedded in the pastoral similes in Books I and II) if, in the shadow of the Waldschloss, one could imagine good coming out of evil. But no, there is neither divine providence nor protection in this castle in this forest, even within the confines of a figure of speech.

If there is a counterplot in ''Castle'', it tends toward retribution, not redemption. By modeling the structure of the Maestro’s infernal organization on the CIA of ''Harlot’s Ghost'', Mailer has assured that Hitler will be denied centrality in his own life story. He will be groomed, honed, tricked out for whatever task his handler deems necessary; he will be scrupulously manipulated; but personally he will matter not at all. It is consistent with the nature of Dieter’s work that he should resist calling any episode in little Adi’s life formative. Intelligence work is like that—uncertain and inconclusive. Dieter’s caveats may give us, painfully, a glimpse of another world, one in which his schemes failed, but in our world, where they succeeded, the absence of formative experiences works towards the progressive diminution of Hitler. Very simply, if fashioning the Führer required hard demonic labor, then we can smile sarcastically along with Dieter as he listens to Himmler expound on Hitler’s superhuman Will and Vision and the rest of the pseudo- political, pseudo-philosophical notions dear to Nazi hearts. Superhuman Will and Vision? Dieter must think the mortals fools. Does Himmler have any idea how many demon-hours (evidently the infernal clocks are not set by eternity) were required to make all those dream etchings (and some of them went nowhere) in Hitler’s brain?

In that light, the coronation of Czar Nicholas II in Book VIII becomes a necessary detour away from rural Austria rather than a digression from Hitler’s biography. In St. Petersburg and at Khodynskoe, the Maestro’s agents are preparing the way for the Bolshevik Revolution and ultimately Stalin, {{pg|311|312}}and one need not indulge in alternative history to see how Hitler’s career depends on their success. The eastern assignment is evidently so important to the demonic designs that it boosts Dieter’s career: “I can vouch that the eight months I lived in Russia from late 1895 to the early summer of 1896 became a prominent element in my development as a high devil.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=213}} But—more diminution—as the reader well knows, Dieter’s Russian strategy also leads to the entry of the Red Army into Berlin and Hitler’s suicide and fiery end.

The diminution of Hitler does not depend solely on future events. In his capacity as biographer from hell, Dieter works against his subject from the beginning, cutting Hitler down to size even as he narrates his life story. Narcissistic and reflexively competitive, Dieter does not gladly share the spotlight with his young charge and his contempt is palpable. (We already know from ''Harlot’s Ghost'' that it is de rigueur for intelligence agents to despise the clients they cultivate). “I, too, am a protagonist,”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=213}} Dieter is quick to remind us. He presents his client as a boy devoid of any admirable qualities, except a talent for war games, the skill that damns him by bringing him to the attention of the Evil One. Otherwise Adi is an unappealing, fearful egotist enamored of power and brute force. Moreover, he suffers from that traditional affliction of the Evil One’s clients, a sulphurous smell. Every so often, Dieter reminds us that the little boy stinks; it is a gratuitous detail, mean and petty, but also funny. Adi is eventually shown to be completely loathsome in his jealousy (possibly murderous—Dieter hedges his bet here) towards his younger brother, the angelic Edmund whose death almost brings a smattering of human emotion to the demon. Compared with Adi, even Alois Senior and Junior, despite their crude appetites, cruelty, and violence, seem recognizably human.

If he demurs on the formative experiences in Adi’s life, Dieter is considerably less reluctant to disclose the requisite personality traits he nurtures in him. He begins by feeding the boy’s vanity, feeding it so well that every incident in his harsh, claustrophobic life is measured by an increase or decrease in his quantity of self-esteem. A stepbrother runs away from home, a brother dies, and Adi is chiefly concerned with his place in the family hierarchy, delighting when he becomes, first, the eldest son, then the only son. Through dreams, Dieter ensures that his young charge believes he has a special destiny, a belief completely contradicted by daytime evidence. The woozy nationalism of the late nineteenth century is seductive and, before long, the {{pg|312|313}}boy links his desperate and defiant sense of personal destiny to that of the ''Volk''. Following an adolescent outburst against both the prevailing prudery and his own sexual disgust, the young Hitler reads Treitschke in a school text and becomes mesmerized by a hyperbolic passage about the mystery and majesty of the German people. He barely understands the words but he is certain they are true. At this juncture, Dieter points menacingly toward the future: “We devils have known for a long time that a mediocre mind, once devoted to one mystical idea, can obtain a mental confidence well beyond its normal potential.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=447}} This is a contemptuous assessment from a biographer who thoroughly knows his subject—and a depressing thought, but true.

To complement his self-induced grandiosity, the young Hitler is schooled by Dieter in the fine art of data selection. When he receives failing grades at the Realschule, the boy convinces himself—with help from his handler—that his failure is actually a sign of intellectual superiority. In a compensatory fantasy, he envisions himself as a schoolteacher giving a lecture on the secret of true learning: “Do not try to remember all the facts of every historical event.... Most of the facts you have memorized are no better than debris which contradict other facts. So you will be in a state of confusion.... Select only those facts which clarify the issues.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=419}} This skill will obviously prove useful in Hitler’s later career. It is, incidentally, worth noting that here Mailer has slyly summarized a basic tool of bad governance, popular with a great many leaders besides Hitler. (One would very much like to know where D.T., the American incarnation of the narrating devil who was once Dieter, would have directed his attention on this side of the Atlantic. But those episodes belong to a subsequent volume that Mailer did not live to write.)

By the time of the ''Realschule'' failures, Dieter has already used Adi’s twin obsessions with primogeniture and patriarchy to prepare him for the apotheosis of data selection—a lifetime of mendacity. (Curiously enough, although he was once reviled by feminists, in ''The Castle in the Forest'' Mailer offers a stunningly cold dissection of patriarchy and its discontents.) When Alois Senior savagely attacks his eldest son, Dieter deploys his infernal machinations to make the terrified little Adi believe that he himself was the victim, and Hitler spends the rest of his life believing that his father almost beat him to death. Through the false memory, Dieter lays the groundwork for an entire edifice of lies: “this fiction would enable me to develop Adi’s future incapacity to tell the truth. By the time his political career began, he was in command of an artwork of lies elaborate enough to support his smallest {{pg|313|314}}need. He could shave the truth by a hair or subvert it altogether.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=316}} If it were any man but Hitler, the pathos of a bogus Oedipal struggle (a hated stepbrother acting as surrogate to confront the vengeful father where three roads meet) would merit pity.

Or, there would be pity, if the narrator were someone other than Dieter. Although he is an immensely entertaining story-teller, he ''is'' a devil, cut off from the full range of human experience, his emotional vocabulary accurate only when expressing combative, competitive egotism. It is useful here to remember how one of Dieter’s literary ancestors, Milton’s Satan, becomes so distracted by Eve’s beauty that for a moment he loses his hate and envy and stands there, abstracted from his usual evil, “Stupidly good.”{{sfn|Milton|1957|p=465}} Dumb passivity is as close as Satan gets to understanding Eden and prelapsarian experience; the local animals and even the plants have richer emotional lives than he does. For his part, Dieter is well-acquainted with envy, self-pity, ambition, lust, physical pain and pleasure. But compassion, longing, sorrow, remorse and love are unfamiliar to him, except in a reductive sense: “we do look for the lowest common denominator to any truth.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=99}}

Dieter’s truncated psyche gets him (that is, his S.S. officer incarnation) killed in the Waldschloss. As he tells it, the Jewish psychiatrist who interrogates him is upset by the pestilential effluvia and the shouts of the liberated prisoners and seeks out Dieter’s company because they are both high-ranking officers. Dieter must have engaged in some extremely obtuse data selection because he has egregiously misjudged the situation. The American has just encountered immeasurably greater horrors than a few bad smells and as a Jew is probably taking the horrors personally. But empathy is so alien to Dieter that he makes the fatal mistake of pretending to be conscience-stricken. (An argument could be made that Dieter is clueless here because he has been wearing the S.S. uniform for so long that even the vestigial sensibilities of a demon have atrophied.) The sense that Dieter gets what he deserves is inescapable.

At that moment, we are abruptly reminded that Dieter is not an impartial narrator nor a reliable one, and we have been of (and at) the devil’s party, amusing ourselves as we watch the heartless education of a wretched little boy in the arts of lying and self-deception. In 1940, in ''The Great Dictator'', Charlie Chaplin imagined Hitler subsumed by a double, an anonymous Jewish barber. What Chaplin began before Hitler was fully yet the murderer he would be-{{pg|314|315}}come, Mailer completes after the fact. Hitler is subsumed by his biographer, the slick Dieter, good at schmoozing and imprinting his own image on his clients. Significantly, Dieter appropriates the soul of the young Hitler without temptation, without the flattery and bogus promises of wealth, power, knowledge, or beautiful women that are the stock-in-trade ploy of the devil. It is possible a temptation scene might have figured in a later episode in a subsequent volume, but that is idle speculation. In the novel as we have it, Dieter so overshadows his client that he effectively blots him out.

As we know from Aristotle, history merely tells us what happened, poetry what might have happened. There is reason to believe (or hope) that if what might have happened is well told enough, the way we perceive what happened changes. Isn’t Napoleon’s invasion of Russia forever defined by Tolstoy and World War I by Hemingway? Then there is a chance—the odds unknown—that some years hence, the popular view of Hitler will be shaped by Mailer’s novel. Hitler, the man of millennial urges who dominated the twentieth-century, reduced to a powerless stick figure—that would be exemplary ''contrapasso'', retributive justice meted out by literature, as though ''The Castle'' were a ''roman à clef'', albeit one written to redress historical rather than private grievances.

Meanwhile, for the present, does the novel-cum-''Purim-shpil'' change anything? If Mailer was correct in his letter to Jack Henry Abbot and my existence was stunted by Hitler, am I less stunted for having read ''Castle in the Forest''?

I resort to another autobiographical vignette.

Some months after my husband gave me ''Castle'' as a Purim gift, we were in a bookstore again, but not, as before, in a strip mall in Pittsburgh. This time we were in a shop near the chic Kärtnerstrasse, close to the street where I was born in Vienna. I had recently had a landmark birthday and it was my husband’s idea that we celebrate it there. After a lifetime of ambivalence about my natal city, I had hesitated. But since he had never really seen Vienna and it has the reputation of being one of the most livable cities in the world, I agreed to go.

On a table, among the new selections, was a stack of books entitled ''Das Schloss im Wald''. I picked up one of the books, thumbed through it, handed it to my husband. We exchanged sly glances. For my purposes, the timing of the German translation of ''The Castle in the Forest'' couldn’t have been more fortuitous.

A clerk was watching us. He had that wonderfully welcoming face that so {{pg|315|316}}many young Austrians have but I thought his expression implied more—a chance, perhaps, to discuss the new book with a couple of Americans.

The possibility of a literary chat was intriguing. Austria was late in addressing its Nazi past, but when it finally did, it undertook the work with commendable seriousness. I had just been to see the inverted blank concrete books of the Holocaust memorial on Judenplatz. It was, I thought, a solemn act of piety.

''“Nein, danke,”'' I shook my head and smiled at the young clerk. I didn’t need any help.

And I didn’t. I could forgo the chat. On the table in front of me I had everything I wanted. The desire for retribution is atavistic, unattractive, and yet undeniable. For the Austrians, concrete books, unwritten and unreadable, made a fit monument. But ''Das Schloss im Wald'', Mailer’s self-razing biography of Hitler, was fit for me.

Yes, Vienna was one of the most livable cities, as well as one of the prettiest. For the first time, I allowed myself to feel the familiar comfort of a childhood home and it was sweet, like ''hamantaschen''.

''I wish to thank Elemer Boreczky, Gloria Erlich, and Carol Holmes for their comments on this essay.''

=== Notes ===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|20em}}

===Works Cited===
{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}
* {{cite journal |last=Anshen |first=David |title=The New Politics of Form in ''Harlot's Ghost'' |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2 |issue=1 |date=2008 |pages=452-73 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Armour |first=Peter |date=2000 |chapter=Dante's ''Contrapasso'': Contexts and Texts |title= Italian Studies |volume=55 |pages=1-20 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Aronowicz |first=Annette |title=''Homens Mapole:'' Hope in the Immediate Postwar Period|url=https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/article/241585|journal=Jewish Quarterly Review |volume=98 |issue=3 |date=2008 |publisher=Project Muse |pages=355-88 |access-date=22 June 2010 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Bernstein |first=Mashey |title=In a Different Way, Norman Mailer Was a Deeply Jewish Writer |url=https://www.proquest.com/docview/194676510/533257E80CD3408CPQ/1?sourcetype=Magazines |journal=Deep South Jewish Voice |volume=18 |issue=1 |date=Dec 2007 |publisher=ProQuest |pages=100–101 |access-date=3 Mar 2009 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Cappell |first=Ezra |date=Nov 2007 |title=Norman Mailer: A Man of Letters Inspired by the People of the Book |url=https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/norman-mailer-man-letters-inspired-people-book/docview/367855341/se-2 |work=Forward |volume=16 |location= |publisher=ProQuest |page=A1 |access-date=3 Mar 2009 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Coetzee |first=J. M. |date=15 Feb 2007 |title=Portrait of the Monster as a Young Artist |magazine=New York Review of Books |volume=54 |issue=2 |pages=8–11 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dante Alighieri |date=2000 |title=Inferno |translator=Robert and Jean Hollander |location=New York |publisher=Doubleday |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Fleming |first=James R. |title='But Where is the Castle?':The Function of Modernist Allegory in Norman Mailer's ''The Castle in the Forest'' |url= |journal=EAPSU Online |volume=5 |date=Fall 2008 |pages=143–55 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Gross |first=John |date=2007 |title="Young Adolf." Rev. of ''The Castle in the Forest.'' |url=https://www.commentary.org/articles/john-gross/the-castle-in-the-forest-by-norman-mailer/ |magazine=Commentary |volume=123 |issue=3 |location=Expanded Academic ASAP |page=59+ |access-date=23 Apr 2010 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Hartman |first=Geoffrey |title=Milton's Counterplot |journal=ELH |volume=28 |issue=1 |date=1958 |pages=1-12 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite web |url=https://etcweb.princeton.edu/ |title=Princeton Dante Project |last1=Hollander |last2=Robert |display-authors=etal |access-date=25 Feb 2010 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kirshenblatt-Gimblett |first=Barbara |date=1980 |title=Contraband: Performance, Text and Analysis of a ''Purim-shpil'' |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/i247940 |journal=Drama Review |volume=24 |issue=3 |publisher=JSTOR |pages=5-16 |doi= |access-date=17 Jan 2009 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lukacs |first=John |date=2010 |title=The Legacy of the Second World War |location=New Haven |publisher=Yale University Press |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |location=New York |publisher=Putnam |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1991 |title=Harlot’s Ghost |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}
* {{cite web |title=Interview by Michael Lennon |url=https://www.bookreporter.com/authors/au-mailer-norman.asp |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=23 Feb 2007 |website=Bookreporter.com |publisher= |access-date=3 Mar 2009 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |title=Norman Mailer: Letters to Jack Abbott |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/03/12/norman-mailer-letters-to-jack-abbott/ |journal=New York Review of Books ||volume=56 |issue=4 |date=12 March 2009 |pages=n. pag. |access-date=7 Aug 2010 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Milton |first=John |date=1957 |title=Paradise Lost. Complete Poems and Major Prose |editor-last1=Hughes |editor-first1=Merritt |location=New York |publisher=Odyssey Press |pages=173–469 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite encyclopedia |date=2007 |title=Purim-Shpil |encyclopedia=Encyclopaedia Judaica |edition= 2nd |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Ricks |first=Christopher |title=The Devil Only Knows |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |date=2007 |pages=206–214 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Siegel |first=Lee |date=21 Jan 2007 |title=Maestro of the Human Ego. Rev. of ''The Castle in the Forest'', by Norman Mailer |url= https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/books/review/Siegel.t.html |work=New York Times |publisher=New York Times |access-date=22 Apr 2010 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Solomon |first=Barbara Probst |title=Mailer’s Choice |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |date=2007 |pages=223–28 |ref=harv }}
{{refend}}

{{Review|state=expanded}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengence in ''The Castle in the Forrest'', The}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in The Castle in the Forest

2025-04-06T16:20:35Z

Maggiemrogers: Final submission of remediated article

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{{Byline|last=Peczenik|first=Fannie|abstract=A close reading of the importance of place in Mailer’s last novel.}}
{{cquote|You don’t know what it is to have six million of your people killed when there are only twelve million of them on earth. You don’t know the profound and fundamental stunting of existence that got into the blood cells of every Jew after Hitler had done his work.|author={{NM}} |source= Letter to Jack Abbott, 18 April 1979{{sfn|Mailer|2009}}}}

When I heard that Mailer had written a fictional biography of Hitler, I made up my mind not to read it. The idea was offensive. At this late date, the life of Adolf Hitler did not merit another examination, least of all in a novel, which would entail an imaginative engagement with the Führer’s private fears, desires, hopes, and dreams. Who wanted to spend time in close communion with that repellent psyche? Not I. Born in post-war Vienna to parents who were Holocaust survivors from Poland, I could say that I had already shared far too much of my life with Hitler.

Distaste is one thing, curiosity another. And I was just curious enough about ''Castle in the Forest'' to read J. M. Coetzee’s essay in the ''New York Review''. A review seemed like a good compromise: appraisal and analysis instead of direct contact. But as it turned out, Coetzee made such a strong argument for the seriousness of the enterprise that I reconsidered my opinion. The novel might have some merit after all. Yet I was in no hurry to read it. Months passed, and then one early spring day, as my husband and I were {{pg|304|305}}strolling through a bookstore, he picked a copy of ''Castle in the Forest'' off a shelf. “Here,” he said, “I’ll get this for you. It’s a Purim gift.”

This autobiographical vignette serves a purpose: there was uncanny pre- science in linking Purim to ''Castle in the Forest''. The holiday celebrates the salvation of the Persian Jews in the Fifth Century BCE from a plot by Haman, the king’s evil advisor, to have the entire community slaughtered. The Book of Esther tells how, with the help of her kinsman Mordechai, she uses her wits and her beauty to foil Haman’s plans. By the king’s decree, victors and victims undergo a swift reversal of fortune. Haman’s plot recoils back on him and he ends up on the very same gallows he had prepared for Mordechai. Meanwhile, the Jews of the realm, permitted to arm themselves, attack and kill Haman’s followers. For the Jews, sorrow is turned to joy and a day of mourning to a festival.

The only boisterous holiday in the Hebrew calendar, Purim is not unlike Carnival in using masks and costumes and giving license to rowdy behavior. That the history of the Jews is replete with other plots against them that do not end so well does not diminish the festivity of Purim; perhaps it only increases it. Through the feasting and merrymaking, the retribution against Haman is reenacted as mockery. Most Americans in urban areas are probably familiar with the special Purim pastries, poppy seed or fruit-filled triangular tarts called ''hamantaschen'', Haman’s pockets, made popular by Eastern European Jewish immigrants. In the synagogue, the holiday is celebrated by a public reading of the Scroll (Megillah) of Esther, during which the congregation deploys noisemakers (called ''greggers'' in Yiddish) to drown out the name of Haman whenever it is said aloud in the reading of the text. As the Hebrew curse has it, Haman’s name is blotted out —
except to denote pastry. Among Ashkenazi Jews, the festivities traditionally included a ''Purim-shpil'', a folk play based on the Purim story or contemporary subjects.{{efn|For a study of the reception of a Purim-shpil performed in the aftermath of World War II, see Aronowicz.{{sfn|Aronwicz|2008}} For a general discussion of the Yiddish folk dramas performed at Purim, see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett{{sfn|Kirshenblatt-Gimblett|1980}} and “''Purim-Shpil'',” ''Encyclopaedia Judaica''.{{sfn|Purim-Shpil|2007}}}} Crossing genre borders, I now propose to read ''Castle'' as a type of Purim entertainment, a ''shpil'' in long prose narrative form that carries the heavy burden of invoking not a catastrophe averted but a catastrophe perpetrated.

First, a disclaimer is in order. ''Castle'' can be read in the context of the retributive charivari of Purim without exaggerating the novel’s Jewish dimensions or Mailer’s engagement with Judaism.{{efn|For various and valuable insights into Mailer’s role as a Jewish writer, see Bernstein,{{sfn|Bernstein|2007}} Cappell,{{sfn|Cappell|2007}} and Siegel.{{sfn|Siegel|2007}}}} In fact, it is instructive to consider ''Castle'' in the light of a very different tradition, what one might call the ''locus classicus'' of retributive justice in Western literature, Canto 28 of Dante’s ''Inferno''. There the pilgrim-poet encounters Bertran de Born who, {{pg|305|306}}having severed filial ties between a father and son, is condemned to carry his own severed head. Holding the head by the hair and swinging it like a lantern, Bertran offers a gloss on his gruesome condition: "''Così s’osserva in me lo contrapasso''" (In me you may observe fit punishment). {{efn|Dante, ''Inferno'', 142.{{sfn|Dante Aligieri|2000|p=142}} For explication and sources, see the commentary to 28. 142 in Hollander, ''Princeton Dante Project''.{{sfn|Hollander|2010|p=142}}}} While scholars disagree on the extent to which the penal code of hell is based the principle of ''contrapasso'', it clearly underlies the punishment of Ugolino and Ruggieri in Canto 33.{{efn|For a comprehensive summary of the issues involved in determining whether all the condemned souls receive condign punishment, see Armour.{{sfn|Armour|2000}}}} Recounting how in life he and his sons were imprisoned by Ruggieri and left to starve, Ugolino implies that hunger drove him to cannibalize his children. So now in hell he is condemned to gnaw forever on the head of Ruggieri; the punishment is superbly efficient, at once echoing the crime and exacting vengeance for it. Dante’s ''contrapasso'', his vision of the precise and punctilious infernal justice of retribution, informs the ''Purim-shpil'' extravagance of ''Castle''. Mailer’s close examination of Hitler’s life—the bibliography appended to the novel is extensive—puts mockery in the service of strict accounting, the measure for measure of condign punishment.

For fifty years he had been waiting to write about Hitler, Mailer said in an interview.{{sfn|Lennon|2007}} During that time, as the Third Reich has been examined and reexamined and incorporated into popular culture, Hitler has become, for the general population, more a figure of speech than a historical reality. The psychic havoc (Mailer’s term in ''Advertisements for Myself'' ) caused by the Second World War has morphed into cliché with the concomitant psychic pall, and the condition extends well beyond the Jewish community. So as the historical Hitler dominated most of Europe and caused the deaths of millions, the figurative Hitler still has the power to thwart discourse—mention his name and it kills the conversation.{{efn|For a concise exposition of still unanswered questions about Hitler’s regime, see Lukacs,{{sfn|Lukacs|2010}} especially 86–108.}} And in the bleak confusion and bold incompetence of American political life at the beginning of the twenty-first century, that name was invoked with alarming frequency (deployed, curiously enough, by both ends of the political spectrum).

Taking on the trope of Hitler, the aging Mailer returns to the prophetic mode of his younger self, who believed his vocation lay in becoming “''consecutively more disruptive, more dangerous, and more powerful.''”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=22}} He remains a disruptive writer, making his readers uncomfortable. But ever the great experimentalist of the narrative voice, he chooses now to speak with the mellow cadences of folktale, telling how ''das Waldschloss'', the castle in the forest, came to be where there was neither cas-{{pg|306|307}}tle nor forest, but only the adamantine irony of inmates from Berlin imprisoned in a concentration camp where there had once been a potato field. We do not learn about this ''Waldschloss'' until the end of the novel, when we have already passed through the other adamantine irony of a tale told to avenge crimes committed more than sixty years before. The long delay has its advantage. As we know from an old adage invoked in Mailer’s ''Harlot’s Ghost'': “OSS working undercover in Italy, 1943, did encounter the following piece of Sicilian wisdom: ‘Revenge is a dish that people of taste eat cold.’” {{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=813}} The time is ripe for low temperature retribution.

Mailer’s instrument of revenge is the novel’s first person narrator, the gregarious, ingratiating, and ambitious devil, incarnated as Dieter the S.S. Officer (renamed D.T. during his residence in America—but of that sojourn we are told very little), who played a leading role in fostering, encouraging, and fashioning Hitler. While his boss, the Evil One, or Maestro, has turned his attention to modern technology, Dieter takes the opportunity to avenge a demotion by betraying the covert demonic organization that employed him and reveal how a boy born to an obscure Austrian peasant family became his most famous client. Barbara Probst Solomon has noted that, deliberately or not, in ''The Castle in the Forest'' Mailer “has turned the tables on Hitler. Hitler’s demonic portrait of the Jews, his obsession with their bloodlines, their presumed inherited characteristics, had to be ingested from sources close to him. And Mailer hunts down Adi’s family with the same obsessiveness and belief in inherited characteristics that Hitler did to the Jews.”{{sfn|Solomon|2007|p=225}} Going far beyond subjecting the Hitler family to intense scrutiny, Mailer has contrived to give them an antagonistic writer of an unauthorized biography, a Kitty Kelley gone wild, or—the temptation to say this is irresistible—the biographer from hell. And so Dieter is.

Even earnest biographers run the risk of appropriating the lives of their subjects. For Dieter appropriation is the goal, as we learn from his teasing discussion of the narrative’s genre: “It is more than a memoir and certainly has to be most curious as a biography since it is as privileged as a novel.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=79}} He may argue against the common belief that demonic possession is total but he can also boast of his mastery of the subject: “I live with the confidence that I am in a position to understand Adolf. For the fact is that I know him. I must repeat. I know him top to bottom.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=9}} On the basis of his successful cultivation of Hitler as a client of the Maestro, Dieter rose through the ranks of the infernal hierarchy, and in telling the story afterwards, the de-{{pg|307|308}}moted (can we call him fallen?) devil is not about to give up his rights to the life of a celebrity. Hitler is still Dieter’s intellectual property, one might say, but the vengeance is only incidentally his. Primarily it is ours.

Dieter’s knowledge of his client is indeed extensive. He generously offers readers copious data accessible only to devils (and novelists) about Hitler’s incestuous genealogy, odious conception, and bullied and bullying childhood. He takes pains to describe the workings of infernal plots and ploys to intervene in human life. Yet nothing about the information he imparts tells us why Hitler turned out as he did—why a dysfunctional family, nasty sibling rivalry, and a failed beekeeping venture, unpleasant as they are, should lead to dictatorship, world war, and genocide. For not providing an explanation for Hitler’s evil, Mailer was criticized by some reviewers (Gross, for example).{{sfn|Gross|2007|p=59+}} They missed the point, I believe. Such criticism presupposes that ''Castle'' should have offered the kind of catharsis-through-information that one finds in murder mysteries. Yet if we knew what caused Hitler to do what he did, would his deeds suddenly become less horrific?{{efn|For an interesting perspective on the impossibility of establishing causal relations in ''Castle'' and elsewhere, see Fleming.{{sfn|Flemming|2008}}}} It is worth noting that even in ''The Executioner’s Song'', where Mailer is dealing with a mundane criminal, there is also no catharsis-through-information. We wait for Gary Gilmore to explain his motive, to say why he murdered the two men he robbed. But he never does.

As though anticipating the objections of his critics, Mailer has Dieter tease us with details whose later historical echo is unmistakable. Relating how Alois Hitler’s beekeeping mentor, der Alte, set fire to one of his hives, Dieter casually mentions that the young Adi happened to be present but takes care to describe the boy’s sadistic excitement: “His toes tingled, his heart shook in its chamber, he did not know whether to scream or to roar with laughter.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=263}} Since der Alte burns the hive in obedience to instructions sent to him in a dream by the very same Dieter and the boy likewise has been instructed by dream to be at the old man’s farm, can we conclude that this is a formative moment? The devil demurs with a shrug. He had just come back from creating mayhem in Russia, he tells us, and he was not up to the task of dealing with the mind of this particular six-year old (the six-year old who interests us more than the entire Russian royal family). If we were expecting to derive some intellectual or emotional satisfaction from that proffered datum about the young Hitler’s fascination with fiery death and mass slaughter, we are disappointed. Dieter denies us the pleasure.

A balder instance is the large ''Hakenkreuz'' carved into the gate of the {{pg|308|309}}monastery school the young Adi attends. At this point the swastika is not yet an abhorrent political symbol; it is merely the coat of arms of an Abbot von Hagen who may have enjoyed the punning allusion to his name. The gate is the scene of an episode in which the nine-year-old Hitler, caught smoking by one of his teachers who happens to be an important client of the infernal powers, has a chance to hone his skills in manipulation and gives up the idea of becoming a priest. Yet as soon as Dieter brings the tantalizing description of the school archway to our attention, he warns us against rushing to conclusions: “Not too much, I hasten to add, should be made of this. Von Hagen’s swastika was subtly carved, and so offered no striking suggestion of the phalanxes yet to march beneath that symbol. Nonetheless, there it was, a crooked cross.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=341-42}} The carving is and is not significant; it does and does not foreshadow the goose-stepping hordes.

Although Dieter has a pronounced impish edge, he does not dangle provocative details before his readers merely to amuse himself at their expense. Ambiguity comes with the secret agent’s territory. The nature of his work requires him to move from one blind stratagem to another, rely on sources of varying credibility, and grasp the opportunities that come with occasional bits of good luck. The outcome is always unpredictable and always obscure; cause and effect are blurred.

The infernal organization to which Dieter belongs is, after all, a literary descendant of the CIA in ''Harlot’s Ghost'', and it is instructive to remember Harry Hubbard’s limited knowledge about the Company (as the agents call their organization) and its manifold machinations against its ostensible enemy, the KGB. Applying the same kind of intellectual limitations to his private life, Hubbard remains unaware of the state of his own floundering marriage. Wandering for decades in a maze of disguises, disinformation, cryptonyms, letters, messages, and fragments of poetry, he finally tries to extricate himself by writing a memoir in two disjointed manuscripts, Alpha and Omega (the other twenty-two letters of the Greek alphabet coming between them, it is unlikely the two parts will ever fit together). Hubbard’s hapless ignorance is institution-wide. Hugh Montague may be the master of literary cryptograms, but his monologue after the Kennedy assassination reveals (in a moment of black humor) his true ignorance as he tries to cover his tracks without knowing precisely where his tracks are. His desperate self-vindication is worthy of one of Robert Browning’s soliloquizing madmen. Always more vulnerable than his superior, Harry even worries that {{pg|309|310}}through the convoluted webs of intrigue he has set in motion, he himself might ultimately be culpable.{{efn|For the “radical indeterminacy” of ''Harlot’s Ghost'', see Anshen, 457.{{sfn|Anshen|2008|p=457}}}}

A supernatural veneer is, evidently, no protection against the ethos of ignorance inherent in covert agencies. Dieter is better informed than Harry only in that, Socratically, he knows how little he knows, admitting (while still status conscious): “I am about as much endowed beyond an accomplished scholar as he in turn is more knowledgeable than a clod from a poorly endowed school.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=236}} To the agent who must traverse the murky terrain of the human mind, that academic advantage counts for very little. And, again, like his human counterpart, Dieter is deliberately kept ignorant by his employer: “In truth, I do not know much about hell. I am not even certain it exists. The Maestro has kept us, after all, in enclaves. We are not supposed to know what we do not need to know.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=385}} Dieter must entertain the possibility that the Maestro is not even the Devil himself, but merely another one of the many infernal bureaucrats. Compartmentalization keeps the agents wandering in the labyrinth of their assigned enclaves.

Dieter is, then, no better than a CIA agent at charting his own success or foreseeing the future course of history (and perhaps the Maestro and his archenemy, the Dummkopf, are also limited in this respect). After the young Adi helps his father gas a hive of sick bees, the boy is sent a dream etching in which he is given an assignment to count the dead insects. Laying them out in rows, he takes pride in counting four thousand dead before the dream is interrupted. But again Dieter adds a caveat against hasty conclusions and reiterates the uncertainty of the outcome:
<blockquote>Here, I would warn the reader not to make too much of the gassing nor the body count. It is not to be understood as the unique cause of all that came later. For a dream-etching... leaves but a dot upon your psyche, a footprint to anticipate a future sequence of development that may or may not come to pass in future decades. Most dream-etchings are not unlike the abandoned foundations one can see on the outskirts of Third World cities. Left to molder for lack of further funds, they lie there, excavations on a scraggly field.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=201}}</blockquote>
As spies plant information and pay informants, so devils etch dreams, but not all of their schemes come to fruition. {{pg|310|311}}

Christopher Ricks has noted that in the descriptions of Alois Hitler’s attempts to become a beekeeper “there are glimpses of something that might have been other, a world of which one would not have had to despair.”{{sfn|Ricks|2007|p=208}} The beehives are a vision not only of a naturally thriving world but of a communal life otherwise unavailable to the Hitler family. Beyond Alois’s visits to the local tavern and, later, an occasional ''Bürgerabend'', there is only hearth and home, subject to frequent changes of address. One might be able to consider the beekeeping episodes as a kind of counterplot (as Geoffrey Hartman called that sense of an omnipresent divine providence protecting creation in ''Paradise Lost'', especially those redemptive images embedded in the pastoral similes in Books I and II) if, in the shadow of the Waldschloss, one could imagine good coming out of evil. But no, there is neither divine providence nor protection in this castle in this forest, even within the confines of a figure of speech.

If there is a counterplot in ''Castle'', it tends toward retribution, not redemption. By modeling the structure of the Maestro’s infernal organization on the CIA of ''Harlot’s Ghost'', Mailer has assured that Hitler will be denied centrality in his own life story. He will be groomed, honed, tricked out for whatever task his handler deems necessary; he will be scrupulously manipulated; but personally he will matter not at all. It is consistent with the nature of Dieter’s work that he should resist calling any episode in little Adi’s life formative. Intelligence work is like that—uncertain and inconclusive. Dieter’s caveats may give us, painfully, a glimpse of another world, one in which his schemes failed, but in our world, where they succeeded, the absence of formative experiences works towards the progressive diminution of Hitler. Very simply, if fashioning the Führer required hard demonic labor, then we can smile sarcastically along with Dieter as he listens to Himmler expound on Hitler’s superhuman Will and Vision and the rest of the pseudo- political, pseudo-philosophical notions dear to Nazi hearts. Superhuman Will and Vision? Dieter must think the mortals fools. Does Himmler have any idea how many demon-hours (evidently the infernal clocks are not set by eternity) were required to make all those dream etchings (and some of them went nowhere) in Hitler’s brain?

In that light, the coronation of Czar Nicholas II in Book VIII becomes a necessary detour away from rural Austria rather than a digression from Hitler’s biography. In St. Petersburg and at Khodynskoe, the Maestro’s agents are preparing the way for the Bolshevik Revolution and ultimately Stalin, {{pg|311|312}}and one need not indulge in alternative history to see how Hitler’s career depends on their success. The eastern assignment is evidently so important to the demonic designs that it boosts Dieter’s career: “I can vouch that the eight months I lived in Russia from late 1895 to the early summer of 1896 became a prominent element in my development as a high devil.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=213}} But—more diminution—as the reader well knows, Dieter’s Russian strategy also leads to the entry of the Red Army into Berlin and Hitler’s suicide and fiery end.

The diminution of Hitler does not depend solely on future events. In his capacity as biographer from hell, Dieter works against his subject from the beginning, cutting Hitler down to size even as he narrates his life story. Narcissistic and reflexively competitive, Dieter does not gladly share the spotlight with his young charge and his contempt is palpable. (We already know from ''Harlot’s Ghost'' that it is de rigueur for intelligence agents to despise the clients they cultivate). “I, too, am a protagonist,”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=213}} Dieter is quick to remind us. He presents his client as a boy devoid of any admirable qualities, except a talent for war games, the skill that damns him by bringing him to the attention of the Evil One. Otherwise Adi is an unappealing, fearful egotist enamored of power and brute force. Moreover, he suffers from that traditional affliction of the Evil One’s clients, a sulphurous smell. Every so often, Dieter reminds us that the little boy stinks; it is a gratuitous detail, mean and petty, but also funny. Adi is eventually shown to be completely loathsome in his jealousy (possibly murderous—Dieter hedges his bet here) towards his younger brother, the angelic Edmund whose death almost brings a smattering of human emotion to the demon. Compared with Adi, even Alois Senior and Junior, despite their crude appetites, cruelty, and violence, seem recognizably human.

If he demurs on the formative experiences in Adi’s life, Dieter is considerably less reluctant to disclose the requisite personality traits he nurtures in him. He begins by feeding the boy’s vanity, feeding it so well that every incident in his harsh, claustrophobic life is measured by an increase or decrease in his quantity of self-esteem. A stepbrother runs away from home, a brother dies, and Adi is chiefly concerned with his place in the family hierarchy, delighting when he becomes, first, the eldest son, then the only son. Through dreams, Dieter ensures that his young charge believes he has a special destiny, a belief completely contradicted by daytime evidence. The woozy nationalism of the late nineteenth century is seductive and, before long, the {{pg|312|313}}boy links his desperate and defiant sense of personal destiny to that of the ''Volk''. Following an adolescent outburst against both the prevailing prudery and his own sexual disgust, the young Hitler reads Treitschke in a school text and becomes mesmerized by a hyperbolic passage about the mystery and majesty of the German people. He barely understands the words but he is certain they are true. At this juncture, Dieter points menacingly toward the future: “We devils have known for a long time that a mediocre mind, once devoted to one mystical idea, can obtain a mental confidence well beyond its normal potential.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=447}} This is a contemptuous assessment from a biographer who thoroughly knows his subject—and a depressing thought, but true.

To complement his self-induced grandiosity, the young Hitler is schooled by Dieter in the fine art of data selection. When he receives failing grades at the Realschule, the boy convinces himself—with help from his handler—that his failure is actually a sign of intellectual superiority. In a compensatory fantasy, he envisions himself as a schoolteacher giving a lecture on the secret of true learning: “Do not try to remember all the facts of every historical event.... Most of the facts you have memorized are no better than debris which contradict other facts. So you will be in a state of confusion.... Select only those facts which clarify the issues.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=419}} This skill will obviously prove useful in Hitler’s later career. It is, incidentally, worth noting that here Mailer has slyly summarized a basic tool of bad governance, popular with a great many leaders besides Hitler. (One would very much like to know where D.T., the American incarnation of the narrating devil who was once Dieter, would have directed his attention on this side of the Atlantic. But those episodes belong to a subsequent volume that Mailer did not live to write.)

By the time of the ''Realschule'' failures, Dieter has already used Adi’s twin obsessions with primogeniture and patriarchy to prepare him for the apotheosis of data selection—a lifetime of mendacity. (Curiously enough, although he was once reviled by feminists, in ''The Castle in the Forest'' Mailer offers a stunningly cold dissection of patriarchy and its discontents.) When Alois Senior savagely attacks his eldest son, Dieter deploys his infernal machinations to make the terrified little Adi believe that he himself was the victim, and Hitler spends the rest of his life believing that his father almost beat him to death. Through the false memory, Dieter lays the groundwork for an entire edifice of lies: “this fiction would enable me to develop Adi’s future incapacity to tell the truth. By the time his political career began, he was in command of an artwork of lies elaborate enough to support his smallest {{pg|313|314}}need. He could shave the truth by a hair or subvert it altogether.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=316}} If it were any man but Hitler, the pathos of a bogus Oedipal struggle (a hated stepbrother acting as surrogate to confront the vengeful father where three roads meet) would merit pity.

Or, there would be pity, if the narrator were someone other than Dieter. Although he is an immensely entertaining story-teller, he ''is'' a devil, cut off from the full range of human experience, his emotional vocabulary accurate only when expressing combative, competitive egotism. It is useful here to remember how one of Dieter’s literary ancestors, Milton’s Satan, becomes so distracted by Eve’s beauty that for a moment he loses his hate and envy and stands there, abstracted from his usual evil, “Stupidly good.”{{sfn|Milton|1957|p=465}} Dumb passivity is as close as Satan gets to understanding Eden and prelapsarian experience; the local animals and even the plants have richer emotional lives than he does. For his part, Dieter is well-acquainted with envy, self-pity, ambition, lust, physical pain and pleasure. But compassion, longing, sorrow, remorse and love are unfamiliar to him, except in a reductive sense: “we do look for the lowest common denominator to any truth.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=99}}

Dieter’s truncated psyche gets him (that is, his S.S. officer incarnation) killed in the Waldschloss. As he tells it, the Jewish psychiatrist who interrogates him is upset by the pestilential effluvia and the shouts of the liberated prisoners and seeks out Dieter’s company because they are both high-ranking officers. Dieter must have engaged in some extremely obtuse data selection because he has egregiously misjudged the situation. The American has just encountered immeasurably greater horrors than a few bad smells and as a Jew is probably taking the horrors personally. But empathy is so alien to Dieter that he makes the fatal mistake of pretending to be conscience-stricken. (An argument could be made that Dieter is clueless here because he has been wearing the S.S. uniform for so long that even the vestigial sensibilities of a demon have atrophied.) The sense that Dieter gets what he deserves is inescapable.

At that moment, we are abruptly reminded that Dieter is not an impartial narrator nor a reliable one, and we have been of (and at) the devil’s party, amusing ourselves as we watch the heartless education of a wretched little boy in the arts of lying and self-deception. In 1940, in ''The Great Dictator'', Charlie Chaplin imagined Hitler subsumed by a double, an anonymous Jewish barber. What Chaplin began before Hitler was fully yet the murderer he would be-{{pg|314|315}}come, Mailer completes after the fact. Hitler is subsumed by his biographer, the slick Dieter, good at schmoozing and imprinting his own image on his clients. Significantly, Dieter appropriates the soul of the young Hitler without temptation, without the flattery and bogus promises of wealth, power, knowledge, or beautiful women that are the stock-in-trade ploy of the devil. It is possible a temptation scene might have figured in a later episode in a subsequent volume, but that is idle speculation. In the novel as we have it, Dieter so overshadows his client that he effectively blots him out.

As we know from Aristotle, history merely tells us what happened, poetry what might have happened. There is reason to believe (or hope) that if what might have happened is well told enough, the way we perceive what happened changes. Isn’t Napoleon’s invasion of Russia forever defined by Tolstoy and World War I by Hemingway? Then there is a chance—the odds unknown—that some years hence, the popular view of Hitler will be shaped by Mailer’s novel. Hitler, the man of millennial urges who dominated the twentieth-century, reduced to a powerless stick figure—that would be exemplary ''contrapasso'', retributive justice meted out by literature, as though ''The Castle'' were a ''roman à clef'', albeit one written to redress historical rather than private grievances.

Meanwhile, for the present, does the novel-cum-''Purim-shpil'' change anything? If Mailer was correct in his letter to Jack Henry Abbot and my existence was stunted by Hitler, am I less stunted for having read ''Castle in the Forest''?

I resort to another autobiographical vignette.

Some months after my husband gave me ''Castle'' as a Purim gift, we were in a bookstore again, but not, as before, in a strip mall in Pittsburgh. This time we were in a shop near the chic Kärtnerstrasse, close to the street where I was born in Vienna. I had recently had a landmark birthday and it was my husband’s idea that we celebrate it there. After a lifetime of ambivalence about my natal city, I had hesitated. But since he had never really seen Vienna and it has the reputation of being one of the most livable cities in the world, I agreed to go.

On a table, among the new selections, was a stack of books entitled ''Das Schloss im Wald''. I picked up one of the books, thumbed through it, handed it to my husband. We exchanged sly glances. For my purposes, the timing of the German translation of ''The Castle in the Forest'' couldn’t have been more fortuitous.

A clerk was watching us. He had that wonderfully welcoming face that so {{pg|315|316}}many young Austrians have but I thought his expression implied more—a chance, perhaps, to discuss the new book with a couple of Americans.

The possibility of a literary chat was intriguing. Austria was late in addressing its Nazi past, but when it finally did, it undertook the work with commendable seriousness. I had just been to see the inverted blank concrete books of the Holocaust memorial on Judenplatz. It was, I thought, a solemn act of piety.

''“Nein, danke,”'' I shook my head and smiled at the young clerk. I didn’t need any help.

And I didn’t. I could forgo the chat. On the table in front of me I had everything I wanted. The desire for retribution is atavistic, unattractive, and yet undeniable. For the Austrians, concrete books, unwritten and unreadable, made a fit monument. But ''Das Schloss im Wald'', Mailer’s self-razing biography of Hitler, was fit for me.

Yes, Vienna was one of the most livable cities, as well as one of the prettiest. For the first time, I allowed myself to feel the familiar comfort of a childhood home and it was sweet, like ''hamantaschen''.

''I wish to thank Elemer Boreczky, Gloria Erlich, and Carol Holmes for their comments on this essay.''

=== Notes ===
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===Citations===
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===Works Cited===
{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}
* {{cite journal |last=Anshen |first=David |title=The New Politics of Form in ''Harlot's Ghost'' |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2 |issue=1 |date=2008 |pages=452-73 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Armour |first=Peter |date=2000 |chapter=Dante's ''Contrapasso'': Contexts and Texts |title= Italian Studies |volume=55 |pages=1-20 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Aronowicz |first=Annette |title=''Homens Mapole:'' Hope in the Immediate Postwar Period|url=https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/article/241585|journal=Jewish Quarterly Review |volume=98 |issue=3 |date=2008 |publisher=Project Muse |pages=355-88 |access-date=22 June 2010 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Bernstein |first=Mashey |title=In a Different Way, Norman Mailer Was a Deeply Jewish Writer |url=https://www.proquest.com/docview/194676510/533257E80CD3408CPQ/1?sourcetype=Magazines |journal=Deep South Jewish Voice |volume=18 |issue=1 |date=Dec 2007 |publisher=ProQuest |pages=100–101 |access-date=3 Mar 2009 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Cappell |first=Ezra |date=Nov 2007 |title=Norman Mailer: A Man of Letters Inspired by the People of the Book |url=https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/norman-mailer-man-letters-inspired-people-book/docview/367855341/se-2 |work=Forward |volume=16 |location= |publisher=ProQuest |page=A1 |access-date=3 Mar 2009 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Coetzee |first=J. M. |date=15 Feb 2007 |title=Portrait of the Monster as a Young Artist |magazine=New York Review of Books |volume=54 |issue=2 |pages=8–11 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dante Alighieri |date=2000 |title=Inferno |translator=Robert and Jean Hollander |location=New York |publisher=Doubleday |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Fleming |first=James R. |title='But Where is the Castle?':The Function of Modernist Allegory in Norman Mailer's ''The Castle in the Forest'' |url= |journal=EAPSU Online |volume=5 |date=Fall 2008 |pages=143–55 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Gross |first=John |date=2007 |title="Young Adolf." Rev. of ''The Castle in the Forest.'' |url=https://www.commentary.org/articles/john-gross/the-castle-in-the-forest-by-norman-mailer/ |magazine=Commentary |volume=123 |issue=3 |location=Expanded Academic ASAP |page=59+ |access-date=23 Apr 2010 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Hartman |first=Geoffrey |title=Milton's Counterplot |journal=ELH |volume=28 |issue=1 |date=1958 |pages=1-12 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite web |url=https://etcweb.princeton.edu/ |title=Princeton Dante Project |last1=Hollander |last2=Robert |display-authors=etal |access-date=25 Feb 2010 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kirshenblatt-Gimblett |first=Barbara |date=1980 |title=Contraband: Performance, Text and Analysis of a ''Purim-shpil'' |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/i247940 |journal=Drama Review |volume=24 |issue=3 |publisher=JSTOR |pages=5-16 |doi= |access-date=17 Jan 2009 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lukacs |first=John |date=2010 |title=The Legacy of the Second World War |location=New Haven |publisher=Yale University Press |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |location=New York |publisher=Putnam |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1991 |title=Harlot’s Ghost |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}
* {{cite web |title=Interview by Michael Lennon |url=https://www.bookreporter.com/authors/au-mailer-norman.asp |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=23 Feb 2007 |website=Bookreporter.com |publisher= |access-date=3 Mar 2009 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |title=Norman Mailer: Letters to Jack Abbott |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/03/12/norman-mailer-letters-to-jack-abbott/ |journal=New York Review of Books ||volume=56 |issue=4 |date=12 March 2009 |pages=n. pag. |access-date=7 Aug 2010 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Milton |first=John |date=1957 |title=Paradise Lost. Complete Poems and Major Prose |editor-last1=Hughes |editor-first1=Merritt |location=New York |publisher=Odyssey Press |pages=173–469 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite encyclopedia |date=2007 |title=Purim-Shpil |encyclopedia=Encyclopaedia Judaica |edition= 2nd |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Ricks |first=Christopher |title=The Devil Only Knows |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |date=2007 |pages=206–214 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Siegel |first=Lee |date=21 Jan 2007 |title=Maestro of the Human Ego. Rev. of ''The Castle in the Forest'', by Norman Mailer |url= https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/books/review/Siegel.t.html |work=New York Times |publisher=New York Times |access-date=22 Apr 2010 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Solomon |first=Barbara Probst |title=Mailer’s Choice |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |date=2007 |pages=223–28 |ref=harv }}
{{refend}}

{{Review|state=expanded}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengence in ''The Castle in the Forrest'', The}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

User:Maggiemrogers/sandbox

2025-04-05T23:38:39Z

Maggiemrogers:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Working}} 

{{Byline|last=Peczenik|first=Fannie|abstract=A close reading of the importance of place in Mailer’s last novel.}}
{{cquote|You don’t know what it is to have six million of your people killed when there are only twelve million of them on earth. You don’t know the profound and fundamental stunting of existence that got into the blood cells of every Jew after Hitler had done his work.}}

(Norman Mailer to Jack Abbott, 18 April 1979){{sfn|Mailer|2009}}

When I heard that Mailer had written a fictional biography of Hitler, I made up my mind not to read it. The idea was offensive. At this late date, the life of Adolf Hitler did not merit another examination, least of all in a novel, which would entail an imaginative engagement with the Führer’s private fears, desires, hopes, and dreams. Who wanted to spend time in close communion with that repellent psyche? Not I. Born in post-war Vienna to parents who were Holocaust survivors from Poland, I could say that I had already shared far too much of my life with Hitler.

Distaste is one thing, curiosity another. And I was just curious enough about ''Castle in the Forest'' to read J. M. Coetzee’s essay in the ''New York Review''. A review seemed like a good compromise: appraisal and analysis instead of direct contact. But as it turned out, Coetzee made such a strong argument for the seriousness of the enterprise that I reconsidered my opinion. The novel might have some merit after all. Yet I was in no hurry to read it. Months passed, and then one early spring day, as my husband and I were {{pg|304|305}}strolling through a bookstore, he picked a copy of ''Castle in the Forest'' off a shelf. “Here,” he said, “I’ll get this for you. It’s a Purim gift.”

This autobiographical vignette serves a purpose: there was uncanny pre- science in linking Purim to ''Castle in the Forest''. The holiday celebrates the salvation of the Persian Jews in the Fifth Century BCE from a plot by Haman, the king’s evil advisor, to have the entire community slaughtered. The Book of Esther tells how, with the help of her kinsman Mordechai, she uses her wits and her beauty to foil Haman’s plans. By the king’s decree, victors and victims undergo a swift reversal of fortune. Haman’s plot recoils back on him and he ends up on the very same gallows he had prepared for Mordechai. Meanwhile, the Jews of the realm, permitted to arm themselves, attack and kill Haman’s followers. For the Jews, sorrow is turned to joy and a day of mourning to a festival.

The only boisterous holiday in the Hebrew calendar, Purim is not unlike Carnival in using masks and costumes and giving license to rowdy behavior. That the history of the Jews is replete with other plots against them that do not end so well does not diminish the festivity of Purim; perhaps it only increases it. Through the feasting and merrymaking, the retribution against Haman is reenacted as mockery. Most Americans in urban areas are probably familiar with the special Purim pastries, poppy seed or fruit-filled triangular tarts called ''hamantaschen'', Haman’s pockets, made popular by Eastern European Jewish immigrants. In the synagogue, the holiday is celebrated by a public reading of the Scroll (Megillah) of Esther, during which the congregation deploys noisemakers (called ''greggers'' in Yiddish) to drown out the name of Haman whenever it is said aloud in the reading of the text. As the Hebrew curse has it, Haman’s name is blotted out —
except to denote pastry. Among Ashkenazi Jews, the festivities traditionally included a ''Purim-shpil'', a folk play based on the Purim story or contemporary subjects.{{efn|For a study of the reception of a Purim-shpil performed in the aftermath of World War II, see Aronowicz.{{sfn|Aronwicz|2008}} For a general discussion of the Yiddish folk dramas performed at Purim, see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett{{sfn|Kirshenblatt-Gimblett|1980}} and “''Purim-Shpil'',” ''Encyclopaedia Judaica''.{{sfn|Purim-Shpil|2007}}}} Crossing genre borders, I now propose to read ''Castle'' as a type of Purim entertainment, a ''shpil'' in long prose narrative form that carries the heavy burden of invoking not a catastrophe averted but a catastrophe perpetrated.

First, a disclaimer is in order. ''Castle'' can be read in the context of the retributive charivari of Purim without exaggerating the novel’s Jewish dimensions or Mailer’s engagement with Judaism.{{efn|For various and valuable insights into Mailer’s role as a Jewish writer, see Bernstein,{{sfn|Bernstein|2007}} Cappell,{{sfn|Cappell|2007}} and Siegel.{{sfn|Siegel|2007}}}} In fact, it is instructive to consider ''Castle'' in the light of a very different tradition, what one might call the ''locus classicus'' of retributive justice in Western literature, Canto 28 of Dante’s ''Inferno''. There the pilgrim-poet encounters Bertran de Born who, {{pg|305|306}}having severed filial ties between a father and son, is condemned to carry his own severed head. Holding the head by the hair and swinging it like a lantern, Bertran offers a gloss on his gruesome condition: "''Così s’osserva in me lo contrapasso''" (In me you may observe fit punishment). {{efn|Dante, ''Inferno'', 142.{{sfn|Dante Aligieri|2000|p=142}} For explication and sources, see the commentary to 28. 142 in Hollander, ''Princeton Dante Project''.{{sfn|Hollander|2010|p=142}}}} While scholars disagree on the extent to which the penal code of hell is based the principle of ''contrapasso'', it clearly underlies the punishment of Ugolino and Ruggieri in Canto 33.{{efn|For a comprehensive summary of the issues involved in determining whether all the condemned souls receive condign punishment, see Armour.{{sfn|Armour|2000}}}} Recounting how in life he and his sons were imprisoned by Ruggieri and left to starve, Ugolino implies that hunger drove him to cannibalize his children. So now in hell he is condemned to gnaw forever on the head of Ruggieri; the punishment is superbly efficient, at once echoing the crime and exacting vengeance for it. Dante’s ''contrapasso'', his vision of the precise and punctilious infernal justice of retribution, informs the ''Purim-shpil'' extravagance of ''Castle''. Mailer’s close examination of Hitler’s life—the bibliography appended to the novel is extensive—puts mockery in the service of strict accounting, the measure for measure of condign punishment.

For fifty years he had been waiting to write about Hitler, Mailer said in an interview.{{sfn|Lennon|2007}} During that time, as the Third Reich has been examined and reexamined and incorporated into popular culture, Hitler has become, for the general population, more a figure of speech than a historical reality. The psychic havoc (Mailer’s term in ''Advertisements for Myself'' ) caused by the Second World War has morphed into cliché with the concomitant psychic pall, and the condition extends well beyond the Jewish community. So as the historical Hitler dominated most of Europe and caused the deaths of millions, the figurative Hitler still has the power to thwart discourse—mention his name and it kills the conversation.{{efn|For a concise exposition of still unanswered questions about Hitler’s regime, see Lukacs,{{sfn|Lukacs|2010}} especially 86–108.}} And in the bleak confusion and bold incompetence of American political life at the beginning of the twenty-first century, that name was invoked with alarming frequency (deployed, curiously enough, by both ends of the political spectrum).

Taking on the trope of Hitler, the aging Mailer returns to the prophetic mode of his younger self, who believed his vocation lay in becoming “''consecutively more disruptive, more dangerous, and more powerful.''”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=22}} He remains a disruptive writer, making his readers uncomfortable. But ever the great experimentalist of the narrative voice, he chooses now to speak with the mellow cadences of folktale, telling how ''das Waldschloss'', the castle in the forest, came to be where there was neither cas-{{pg|306|307}}tle nor forest, but only the adamantine irony of inmates from Berlin imprisoned in a concentration camp where there had once been a potato field. We do not learn about this ''Waldschloss'' until the end of the novel, when we have already passed through the other adamantine irony of a tale told to avenge crimes committed more than sixty years before. The long delay has its advantage. As we know from an old adage invoked in Mailer’s ''Harlot’s Ghost'': “OSS working undercover in Italy, 1943, did encounter the following piece of Sicilian wisdom: ‘Revenge is a dish that people of taste eat cold.’” {{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=813}} The time is ripe for low temperature retribution.

Mailer’s instrument of revenge is the novel’s first person narrator, the gregarious, ingratiating, and ambitious devil, incarnated as Dieter the S.S. Officer (renamed D.T. during his residence in America—but of that sojourn we are told very little), who played a leading role in fostering, encouraging, and fashioning Hitler. While his boss, the Evil One, or Maestro, has turned his attention to modern technology, Dieter takes the opportunity to avenge a demotion by betraying the covert demonic organization that employed him and reveal how a boy born to an obscure Austrian peasant family became his most famous client. Barbara Probst Solomon has noted that, deliberately or not, in ''The Castle in the Forest'' Mailer “has turned the tables on Hitler. Hitler’s demonic portrait of the Jews, his obsession with their bloodlines, their presumed inherited characteristics, had to be ingested from sources close to him. And Mailer hunts down Adi’s family with the same obsessiveness and belief in inherited characteristics that Hitler did to the Jews.”{{sfn|Solomon|2007|p=225}} Going far beyond subjecting the Hitler family to intense scrutiny, Mailer has contrived to give them an antagonistic writer of an unauthorized biography, a Kitty Kelley gone wild, or—the temptation to say this is irresistible—the biographer from hell. And so Dieter is.

Even earnest biographers run the risk of appropriating the lives of their subjects. For Dieter appropriation is the goal, as we learn from his teasing discussion of the narrative’s genre: “It is more than a memoir and certainly has to be most curious as a biography since it is as privileged as a novel.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=79}} He may argue against the common belief that demonic possession is total but he can also boast of his mastery of the subject: “I live with the confidence that I am in a position to understand Adolf. For the fact is that I know him. I must repeat. I know him top to bottom.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=9}} On the basis of his successful cultivation of Hitler as a client of the Maestro, Dieter rose through the ranks of the infernal hierarchy, and in telling the story afterwards, the de-{{pg|307|308}}moted (can we call him fallen?) devil is not about to give up his rights to the life of a celebrity. Hitler is still Dieter’s intellectual property, one might say, but the vengeance is only incidentally his. Primarily it is ours.

Dieter’s knowledge of his client is indeed extensive. He generously offers readers copious data accessible only to devils (and novelists) about Hitler’s incestuous genealogy, odious conception, and bullied and bullying childhood. He takes pains to describe the workings of infernal plots and ploys to intervene in human life. Yet nothing about the information he imparts tells us why Hitler turned out as he did—why a dysfunctional family, nasty sibling rivalry, and a failed beekeeping venture, unpleasant as they are, should lead to dictatorship, world war, and genocide. For not providing an explanation for Hitler’s evil, Mailer was criticized by some reviewers (Gross, for example).{{sfn|Gross|2007|p=59+}} They missed the point, I believe. Such criticism presupposes that ''Castle'' should have offered the kind of catharsis-through-information that one finds in murder mysteries. Yet if we knew what caused Hitler to do what he did, would his deeds suddenly become less horrific?{{efn|For an interesting perspective on the impossibility of establishing causal relations in ''Castle'' and elsewhere, see Fleming.{{sfn|Flemming|2008}}}} It is worth noting that even in ''The Executioner’s Song'', where Mailer is dealing with a mundane criminal, there is also no catharsis-through-information. We wait for Gary Gilmore to explain his motive, to say why he murdered the two men he robbed. But he never does.

As though anticipating the objections of his critics, Mailer has Dieter tease us with details whose later historical echo is unmistakable. Relating how Alois Hitler’s beekeeping mentor, der Alte, set fire to one of his hives, Dieter casually mentions that the young Adi happened to be present but takes care to describe the boy’s sadistic excitement: “His toes tingled, his heart shook in its chamber, he did not know whether to scream or to roar with laughter.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=263}} Since der Alte burns the hive in obedience to instructions sent to him in a dream by the very same Dieter and the boy likewise has been instructed by dream to be at the old man’s farm, can we conclude that this is a formative moment? The devil demurs with a shrug. He had just come back from creating mayhem in Russia, he tells us, and he was not up to the task of dealing with the mind of this particular six-year old (the six-year old who interests us more than the entire Russian royal family). If we were expecting to derive some intellectual or emotional satisfaction from that proffered datum about the young Hitler’s fascination with fiery death and mass slaughter, we are disappointed. Dieter denies us the pleasure.

A balder instance is the large ''Hakenkreuz'' carved into the gate of the {{pg|308|309}}monastery school the young Adi attends. At this point the swastika is not yet an abhorrent political symbol; it is merely the coat of arms of an Abbot von Hagen who may have enjoyed the punning allusion to his name. The gate is the scene of an episode in which the nine-year-old Hitler, caught smoking by one of his teachers who happens to be an important client of the infernal powers, has a chance to hone his skills in manipulation and gives up the idea of becoming a priest. Yet as soon as Dieter brings the tantalizing description of the school archway to our attention, he warns us against rushing to conclusions: “Not too much, I hasten to add, should be made of this. Von Hagen’s swastika was subtly carved, and so offered no striking suggestion of the phalanxes yet to march beneath that symbol. Nonetheless, there it was, a crooked cross.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=341-42}} The carving is and is not significant; it does and does not foreshadow the goose-stepping hordes.

Although Dieter has a pronounced impish edge, he does not dangle provocative details before his readers merely to amuse himself at their expense. Ambiguity comes with the secret agent’s territory. The nature of his work requires him to move from one blind stratagem to another, rely on sources of varying credibility, and grasp the opportunities that come with occasional bits of good luck. The outcome is always unpredictable and always obscure; cause and effect are blurred.

The infernal organization to which Dieter belongs is, after all, a literary descendant of the CIA in ''Harlot’s Ghost'', and it is instructive to remember Harry Hubbard’s limited knowledge about the Company (as the agents call their organization) and its manifold machinations against its ostensible enemy, the KGB. Applying the same kind of intellectual limitations to his private life, Hubbard remains unaware of the state of his own floundering marriage. Wandering for decades in a maze of disguises, disinformation, cryptonyms, letters, messages, and fragments of poetry, he finally tries to extricate himself by writing a memoir in two disjointed manuscripts, Alpha and Omega (the other twenty-two letters of the Greek alphabet coming between them, it is unlikely the two parts will ever fit together). Hubbard’s hapless ignorance is institution-wide. Hugh Montague may be the master of literary cryptograms, but his monologue after the Kennedy assassination reveals (in a moment of black humor) his true ignorance as he tries to cover his tracks without knowing precisely where his tracks are. His desperate self-vindication is worthy of one of Robert Browning’s soliloquizing madmen. Always more vulnerable than his superior, Harry even worries that {{pg|309|310}}through the convoluted webs of intrigue he has set in motion, he himself might ultimately be culpable.{{efn|For the “radical indeterminacy” of ''Harlot’s Ghost'', see Anshen, 457.{{sfn|Anshen|2008|p=457}}}}

A supernatural veneer is, evidently, no protection against the ethos of ignorance inherent in covert agencies. Dieter is better informed than Harry only in that, Socratically, he knows how little he knows, admitting (while still status conscious): “I am about as much endowed beyond an accomplished scholar as he in turn is more knowledgeable than a clod from a poorly endowed school.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=236}} To the agent who must traverse the murky terrain of the human mind, that academic advantage counts for very little. And, again, like his human counterpart, Dieter is deliberately kept ignorant by his employer: “In truth, I do not know much about hell. I am not even certain it exists. The Maestro has kept us, after all, in enclaves. We are not supposed to know what we do not need to know.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=385}} Dieter must entertain the possibility that the Maestro is not even the Devil himself, but merely another one of the many infernal bureaucrats. Compartmentalization keeps the agents wandering in the labyrinth of their assigned enclaves.

Dieter is, then, no better than a CIA agent at charting his own success or foreseeing the future course of history (and perhaps the Maestro and his archenemy, the Dummkopf, are also limited in this respect). After the young Adi helps his father gas a hive of sick bees, the boy is sent a dream etching in which he is given an assignment to count the dead insects. Laying them out in rows, he takes pride in counting four thousand dead before the dream is interrupted. But again Dieter adds a caveat against hasty conclusions and reiterates the uncertainty of the outcome:
<blockquote>Here, I would warn the reader not to make too much of the gassing nor the body count. It is not to be understood as the unique cause of all that came later. For a dream-etching... leaves but a dot upon your psyche, a footprint to anticipate a future sequence of development that may or may not come to pass in future decades. Most dream-etchings are not unlike the abandoned foundations one can see on the outskirts of Third World cities. Left to molder for lack of further funds, they lie there, excavations on a scraggly field.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=201}}</blockquote>
As spies plant information and pay informants, so devils etch dreams, but not all of their schemes come to fruition. {{pg|310|311}}

Christopher Ricks has noted that in the descriptions of Alois Hitler’s attempts to become a beekeeper “there are glimpses of something that might have been other, a world of which one would not have had to despair.”{{sfn|Ricks|2007|p=208}} The beehives are a vision not only of a naturally thriving world but of a communal life otherwise unavailable to the Hitler family. Beyond Alois’s visits to the local tavern and, later, an occasional ''Bürgerabend'', there is only hearth and home, subject to frequent changes of address. One might be able to consider the beekeeping episodes as a kind of counterplot (as Geoffrey Hartman called that sense of an omnipresent divine providence protecting creation in ''Paradise Lost'', especially those redemptive images embedded in the pastoral similes in Books I and II) if, in the shadow of the Waldschloss, one could imagine good coming out of evil. But no, there is neither divine providence nor protection in this castle in this forest, even within the confines of a figure of speech.

If there is a counterplot in ''Castle'', it tends toward retribution, not redemption. By modeling the structure of the Maestro’s infernal organization on the CIA of ''Harlot’s Ghost'', Mailer has assured that Hitler will be denied centrality in his own life story. He will be groomed, honed, tricked out for whatever task his handler deems necessary; he will be scrupulously manipulated; but personally he will matter not at all. It is consistent with the nature of Dieter’s work that he should resist calling any episode in little Adi’s life formative. Intelligence work is like that—uncertain and inconclusive. Dieter’s caveats may give us, painfully, a glimpse of another world, one in which his schemes failed, but in our world, where they succeeded, the absence of formative experiences works towards the progressive diminution of Hitler. Very simply, if fashioning the Führer required hard demonic labor, then we can smile sarcastically along with Dieter as he listens to Himmler expound on Hitler’s superhuman Will and Vision and the rest of the pseudo- political, pseudo-philosophical notions dear to Nazi hearts. Superhuman Will and Vision? Dieter must think the mortals fools. Does Himmler have any idea how many demon-hours (evidently the infernal clocks are not set by eternity) were required to make all those dream etchings (and some of them went nowhere) in Hitler’s brain?

In that light, the coronation of Czar Nicholas II in Book VIII becomes a necessary detour away from rural Austria rather than a digression from Hitler’s biography. In St. Petersburg and at Khodynskoe, the Maestro’s agents are preparing the way for the Bolshevik Revolution and ultimately Stalin, {{pg|311|312}}and one need not indulge in alternative history to see how Hitler’s career depends on their success. The eastern assignment is evidently so important to the demonic designs that it boosts Dieter’s career: “I can vouch that the eight months I lived in Russia from late 1895 to the early summer of 1896 became a prominent element in my development as a high devil.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=213}} But—more diminution—as the reader well knows, Dieter’s Russian strategy also leads to the entry of the Red Army into Berlin and Hitler’s suicide and fiery end.

The diminution of Hitler does not depend solely on future events. In his capacity as biographer from hell, Dieter works against his subject from the beginning, cutting Hitler down to size even as he narrates his life story. Narcissistic and reflexively competitive, Dieter does not gladly share the spotlight with his young charge and his contempt is palpable. (We already know from ''Harlot’s Ghost'' that it is de rigueur for intelligence agents to despise the clients they cultivate). “I, too, am a protagonist,”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=213}} Dieter is quick to remind us. He presents his client as a boy devoid of any admirable qualities, except a talent for war games, the skill that damns him by bringing him to the attention of the Evil One. Otherwise Adi is an unappealing, fearful egotist enamored of power and brute force. Moreover, he suffers from that traditional affliction of the Evil One’s clients, a sulphurous smell. Every so often, Dieter reminds us that the little boy stinks; it is a gratuitous detail, mean and petty, but also funny. Adi is eventually shown to be completely loathsome in his jealousy (possibly murderous—Dieter hedges his bet here) towards his younger brother, the angelic Edmund whose death almost brings a smattering of human emotion to the demon. Compared with Adi, even Alois Senior and Junior, despite their crude appetites, cruelty, and violence, seem recognizably human.

If he demurs on the formative experiences in Adi’s life, Dieter is considerably less reluctant to disclose the requisite personality traits he nurtures in him. He begins by feeding the boy’s vanity, feeding it so well that every incident in his harsh, claustrophobic life is measured by an increase or decrease in his quantity of self-esteem. A stepbrother runs away from home, a brother dies, and Adi is chiefly concerned with his place in the family hierarchy, delighting when he becomes, first, the eldest son, then the only son. Through dreams, Dieter ensures that his young charge believes he has a special destiny, a belief completely contradicted by daytime evidence. The woozy nationalism of the late nineteenth century is seductive and, before long, the {{pg|312|313}}boy links his desperate and defiant sense of personal destiny to that of the ''Volk''. Following an adolescent outburst against both the prevailing prudery and his own sexual disgust, the young Hitler reads Treitschke in a school text and becomes mesmerized by a hyperbolic passage about the mystery and majesty of the German people. He barely understands the words but he is certain they are true. At this juncture, Dieter points menacingly toward the future: “We devils have known for a long time that a mediocre mind, once devoted to one mystical idea, can obtain a mental confidence well beyond its normal potential.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=447}} This is a contemptuous assessment from a biographer who thoroughly knows his subject—and a depressing thought, but true.

To complement his self-induced grandiosity, the young Hitler is schooled by Dieter in the fine art of data selection. When he receives failing grades at the Realschule, the boy convinces himself—with help from his handler—that his failure is actually a sign of intellectual superiority. In a compensatory fantasy, he envisions himself as a schoolteacher giving a lecture on the secret of true learning: “Do not try to remember all the facts of every historical event.... Most of the facts you have memorized are no better than debris which contradict other facts. So you will be in a state of confusion.... Select only those facts which clarify the issues.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=419}} This skill will obviously prove useful in Hitler’s later career. It is, incidentally, worth noting that here Mailer has slyly summarized a basic tool of bad governance, popular with a great many leaders besides Hitler. (One would very much like to know where D.T., the American incarnation of the narrating devil who was once Dieter, would have directed his attention on this side of the Atlantic. But those episodes belong to a subsequent volume that Mailer did not live to write.)

By the time of the ''Realschule'' failures, Dieter has already used Adi’s twin obsessions with primogeniture and patriarchy to prepare him for the apotheosis of data selection—a lifetime of mendacity. (Curiously enough, although he was once reviled by feminists, in ''The Castle in the Forest'' Mailer offers a stunningly cold dissection of patriarchy and its discontents.) When Alois Senior savagely attacks his eldest son, Dieter deploys his infernal machinations to make the terrified little Adi believe that he himself was the victim, and Hitler spends the rest of his life believing that his father almost beat him to death. Through the false memory, Dieter lays the groundwork for an entire edifice of lies: “this fiction would enable me to develop Adi’s future incapacity to tell the truth. By the time his political career began, he was in command of an artwork of lies elaborate enough to support his smallest {{pg|313|314}}need. He could shave the truth by a hair or subvert it altogether.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=316}} If it were any man but Hitler, the pathos of a bogus Oedipal struggle (a hated stepbrother acting as surrogate to confront the vengeful father where three roads meet) would merit pity.

Or, there would be pity, if the narrator were someone other than Dieter. Although he is an immensely entertaining story-teller, he ''is'' a devil, cut off from the full range of human experience, his emotional vocabulary accurate only when expressing combative, competitive egotism. It is useful here to remember how one of Dieter’s literary ancestors, Milton’s Satan, becomes so distracted by Eve’s beauty that for a moment he loses his hate and envy and stands there, abstracted from his usual evil, “Stupidly good.”{{sfn|Milton|1957|p=465}} Dumb passivity is as close as Satan gets to understanding Eden and prelapsarian experience; the local animals and even the plants have richer emotional lives than he does. For his part, Dieter is well-acquainted with envy, self-pity, ambition, lust, physical pain and pleasure. But compassion, longing, sorrow, remorse and love are unfamiliar to him, except in a reductive sense: “we do look for the lowest common denominator to any truth.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=99}}

Dieter’s truncated psyche gets him (that is, his S.S. officer incarnation) killed in the Waldschloss. As he tells it, the Jewish psychiatrist who interrogates him is upset by the pestilential effluvia and the shouts of the liberated prisoners and seeks out Dieter’s company because they are both high-ranking officers. Dieter must have engaged in some extremely obtuse data selection because he has egregiously misjudged the situation. The American has just encountered immeasurably greater horrors than a few bad smells and as a Jew is probably taking the horrors personally. But empathy is so alien to Dieter that he makes the fatal mistake of pretending to be conscience-stricken. (An argument could be made that Dieter is clueless here because he has been wearing the S.S. uniform for so long that even the vestigial sensibilities of a demon have atrophied.) The sense that Dieter gets what he deserves is inescapable.

At that moment, we are abruptly reminded that Dieter is not an impartial narrator nor a reliable one, and we have been of (and at) the devil’s party, amusing ourselves as we watch the heartless education of a wretched little boy in the arts of lying and self-deception. In 1940, in ''The Great Dictator'', Charlie Chaplin imagined Hitler subsumed by a double, an anonymous Jewish barber. What Chaplin began before Hitler was fully yet the murderer he would be-{{pg|314|315}}come, Mailer completes after the fact. Hitler is subsumed by his biographer, the slick Dieter, good at schmoozing and imprinting his own image on his clients. Significantly, Dieter appropriates the soul of the young Hitler without temptation, without the flattery and bogus promises of wealth, power, knowledge, or beautiful women that are the stock-in-trade ploy of the devil. It is possible a temptation scene might have figured in a later episode in a subsequent volume, but that is idle speculation. In the novel as we have it, Dieter so overshadows his client that he effectively blots him out.

As we know from Aristotle, history merely tells us what happened, poetry what might have happened. There is reason to believe (or hope) that if what might have happened is well told enough, the way we perceive what happened changes. Isn’t Napoleon’s invasion of Russia forever defined by Tolstoy and World War I by Hemingway? Then there is a chance—the odds unknown—that some years hence, the popular view of Hitler will be shaped by Mailer’s novel. Hitler, the man of millennial urges who dominated the twentieth-century, reduced to a powerless stick figure—that would be exemplary ''contrapasso'', retributive justice meted out by literature, as though ''The Castle'' were a ''roman à clef'', albeit one written to redress historical rather than private grievances.

Meanwhile, for the present, does the novel-cum-''Purim-shpil'' change anything? If Mailer was correct in his letter to Jack Henry Abbot and my existence was stunted by Hitler, am I less stunted for having read ''Castle in the Forest''?

I resort to another autobiographical vignette.

Some months after my husband gave me ''Castle'' as a Purim gift, we were in a bookstore again, but not, as before, in a strip mall in Pittsburgh. This time we were in a shop near the chic Kärtnerstrasse, close to the street where I was born in Vienna. I had recently had a landmark birthday and it was my husband’s idea that we celebrate it there. After a lifetime of ambivalence about my natal city, I had hesitated. But since he had never really seen Vienna and it has the reputation of being one of the most livable cities in the world, I agreed to go.

On a table, among the new selections, was a stack of books entitled ''Das Schloss im Wald''. I picked up one of the books, thumbed through it, handed it to my husband. We exchanged sly glances. For my purposes, the timing of the German translation of ''The Castle in the Forest'' couldn’t have been more fortuitous.

A clerk was watching us. He had that wonderfully welcoming face that so {{pg|315|316}}many young Austrians have but I thought his expression implied more—a chance, perhaps, to discuss the new book with a couple of Americans.

The possibility of a literary chat was intriguing. Austria was late in addressing its Nazi past, but when it finally did, it undertook the work with commendable seriousness. I had just been to see the inverted blank concrete books of the Holocaust memorial on Judenplatz. It was, I thought, a solemn act of piety.

''“Nein, danke,”'' I shook my head and smiled at the young clerk. I didn’t need any help.

And I didn’t. I could forgo the chat. On the table in front of me I had everything I wanted. The desire for retribution is atavistic, unattractive, and yet undeniable. For the Austrians, concrete books, unwritten and unreadable, made a fit monument. But ''Das Schloss im Wald'', Mailer’s self-razing biography of Hitler, was fit for me.

Yes, Vienna was one of the most livable cities, as well as one of the prettiest. For the first time, I allowed myself to feel the familiar comfort of a childhood home and it was sweet, like ''hamantaschen''.

''I wish to thank Elemer Boreczky, Gloria Erlich, and Carol Holmes for their comments on this essay.''

=== Notes ===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|20em}}

===Works Cited===
{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}
* {{cite journal |last=Anshen |first=David |title=The New Politics of Form in ''Harlot's Ghost'' |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2 |issue=1 |date=2008 |pages=452-73 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Armour |first=Peter |date=2000 |chapter=Dante's ''Contrapasso'': Contexts and Texts |title= Italian Studies |volume=55 |pages=1-20 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Aronowicz |first=Annette |title=''Homens Mapole:'' Hope in the Immediate Postwar Period|url=https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/article/241585|journal=Jewish Quarterly Review |volume=98 |issue=3 |date=2008 |publisher=Project Muse |pages=355-88 |access-date=22 June 2010 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Bernstein |first=Mashey |title=In a Different Way, Norman Mailer Was a Deeply Jewish Writer |url=https://www.proquest.com/docview/194676510/533257E80CD3408CPQ/1?sourcetype=Magazines |journal=Deep South Jewish Voice |volume=18 |issue=1 |date=Dec 2007 |publisher=ProQuest |pages=100–101 |access-date=3 Mar 2009 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Cappell |first=Ezra |date=Nov 2007 |title=Norman Mailer: A Man of Letters Inspired by the People of the Book |url=https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/norman-mailer-man-letters-inspired-people-book/docview/367855341/se-2 |work=Forward |volume=16 |location= |publisher=ProQuest |page=A1 |access-date=3 Mar 2009 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Coetzee |first=J. M. |date=15 Feb 2007 |title=Portrait of the Monster as a Young Artist |magazine=New York Review of Books |volume=54 |issue=2 |pages=8–11 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dante Alighieri |date=2000 |title=Inferno |translator=Robert and Jean Hollander |location=New York |publisher=Doubleday |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Fleming |first=James R. |title='But Where is the Castle?':The Function of Modernist Allegory in Norman
Mailer's ''The Castle in the Forest'' |url=https://cdn.wildapricot.com/209073/resources/impost/volumes/EAPSU%20Online%20-%20Volume%20Five.pdf?version=1465494662000&Policy=eyJTdGF0ZW1lbnQiOiBbeyJSZXNvdXJjZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vY2RuLndpbGRhcHJpY290LmNvbS8yMDkwNzMvcmVzb3VyY2VzL2ltcG9zdC92b2x1bWVzL0VBUFNVJTIwT25saW5lJTIwLSUyMFZvbHVtZSUyMEZpdmUucGRmP3ZlcnNpb249MTQ2NTQ5NDY2MjAwMCIsIkNvbmRpdGlvbiI6eyJEYXRlTGVzc1RoYW4iOnsiQVdTOkVwb2NoVGltZSI6MTc0MzQ2ODc3NX0sIklwQWRkcmVzcyI6eyJBV1M6U291cmNlSXAiOiIwLjAuMC4wLzAifX19XX0_&Signature=CzNUJE~LVXu1ScnPUaKX8js3Pw74M8XKUIhIwjPNXcTQvPeq6UASgLR3xhri3Zo5OPJt439qiY9ieBNTwsTOScvbVO9hl0YYebHZkCqn0eMmuFpqVifJn20eXUDfphI8PIeUCA4kMe6LYogWH4OJuKTRp9Efdas1ppdinvl0vtTXEp6B8oszT4Wx2xPSOAco9YmyyHQL5K6oPAIboQBEYMDOAR1J0Ag0zOIRQkevsAtBBKDdvYlBlprxzJDwV0iGW5Mas-Vzn8Eprss-nFvsMyK0A0st7P0mWnBx0LJvOD4xUygRl2bl7Mp0-WqDkzQ9ubaQP53bSRnIdAmxkZrIOA__&Key-Pair-Id=K27MGQSHTHAGGF |journal=EAPSU Online |volume=5 |date=Fall 2008 |pages=143–55 |access-date=11 July 2010 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Gross |first=John |date=2007 |title="Young Adolf." Rev. of ''The Castle in the Forest.'' |url=https://www.commentary.org/articles/john-gross/the-castle-in-the-forest-by-norman-mailer/ |magazine=Commentary |volume=123 |issue=3 |location=Expanded Academic ASAP |page=59+ |access-date=23 Apr 2010 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Hartman |first=Geoffrey |title=Milton's Counterplot |journal=ELH |volume=28 |issue=1 |date=1958 |pages=1-12 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite web |url=https://etcweb.princeton.edu/ |title=Princeton Dante Project |last1=Hollander |last2=Robert |display-authors=etal |access-date=25 Feb 2010 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kirshenblatt-Gimblett |first=Barbara |date=1980 |title=Contraband: Performance, Text and Analysis of a ''Purim-shpil'' |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/i247940 |journal=Drama Review |volume=24 |issue=3 |publisher=JSTOR |pages=5-16 |doi= |access-date=17 Jan 2009 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lukacs |first=John |date=2010 |title=The Legacy of the Second World War |location=New Haven |publisher=Yale University Press |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |location=New York |publisher=Putnam |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1991 |title=Harlot’s Ghost |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}
* {{cite web |title=Interview by Michael Lennon |url=https://www.bookreporter.com/authors/au-mailer-norman.asp |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=23 Feb 2007 |website=Bookreporter.com |publisher= |access-date=3 Mar 2009 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |title=Norman Mailer: Letters to Jack Abbott |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/03/12/norman-mailer-letters-to-jack-abbott/ |journal=New York Review of Books ||volume=56 |issue=4 |date=12 March 2009 |pages=n. pag. |access-date=7 Aug 2010 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Milton |first=John |date=1957 |title=Paradise Lost. Complete Poems and Major Prose |editor-last1=Hughes |editor-first1=Merritt |location=New York |publisher=Odyssey Press |pages=173–469 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite encyclopedia |date=2007 |title=Purim-Shpil |encyclopedia=Encyclopaedia Judaica |edition= 2nd |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Ricks |first=Christopher |title=The Devil Only Knows |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |date=2007 |pages=206–214 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Siegel |first=Lee |date=21 Jan 2007 |title=Maestro of the Human Ego. Rev. of ''The Castle in the Forest'', by Norman Mailer |url= https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/books/review/Siegel.t.html |work=New York Times |publisher=New York Times |access-date=22 Apr 2010 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Solomon |first=Barbara Probst |title=Mailer’s Choice |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |date=2007 |pages=223–28 |ref=harv }}
{{refend}}

{{Review|state=expanded}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengence in ''The Castle in the Forrest'', The}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

User:Maggiemrogers/sandbox

2025-04-05T23:27:55Z

Maggiemrogers:

<blockquote>You don’t know what it is to have six million of your people killed when there are only twelve million of them on earth. You don’t know the profound and fundamental stunting of existence that got into the blood cells of every Jew after Hitler had done his work. (Norman Mailer to Jack Abbott, 18 April 1979){{sfn|Mailer|2009}}</blockquote>

When I heard that Mailer had written a fictional biography of Hitler, I made up my mind not to read it. The idea was offensive. At this late date, the life of Adolf Hitler did not merit another examination, least of all in a novel, which would entail an imaginative engagement with the Führer’s private fears, desires, hopes, and dreams. Who wanted to spend time in close communion with that repellent psyche? Not I. Born in post-war Vienna to parents who were Holocaust survivors from Poland, I could say that I had already shared far too much of my life with Hitler.

Distaste is one thing, curiosity another. And I was just curious enough about ''Castle in the Forest'' to read J. M. Coetzee’s essay in the ''New York Review''. A review seemed like a good compromise: appraisal and analysis instead of direct contact. But as it turned out, Coetzee made such a strong argument for the seriousness of the enterprise that I reconsidered my opinion. The novel might have some merit after all. Yet I was in no hurry to read it. Months passed, and then one early spring day, as my husband and I were {{pg|304|305}}strolling through a bookstore, he picked a copy of ''Castle in the Forest'' off a shelf. “Here,” he said, “I’ll get this for you. It’s a Purim gift.”

This autobiographical vignette serves a purpose: there was uncanny pre- science in linking Purim to ''Castle in the Forest''. The holiday celebrates the salvation of the Persian Jews in the Fifth Century BCE from a plot by Haman, the king’s evil advisor, to have the entire community slaughtered. The Book of Esther tells how, with the help of her kinsman Mordechai, she uses her wits and her beauty to foil Haman’s plans. By the king’s decree, victors and victims undergo a swift reversal of fortune. Haman’s plot recoils back on him and he ends up on the very same gallows he had prepared for Mordechai. Meanwhile, the Jews of the realm, permitted to arm themselves, attack and kill Haman’s followers. For the Jews, sorrow is turned to joy and a day of mourning to a festival.

The only boisterous holiday in the Hebrew calendar, Purim is not unlike Carnival in using masks and costumes and giving license to rowdy behavior. That the history of the Jews is replete with other plots against them that do not end so well does not diminish the festivity of Purim; perhaps it only increases it. Through the feasting and merrymaking, the retribution against Haman is reenacted as mockery. Most Americans in urban areas are probably familiar with the special Purim pastries, poppy seed or fruit-filled triangular tarts called ''hamantaschen'', Haman’s pockets, made popular by Eastern European Jewish immigrants. In the synagogue, the holiday is celebrated by a public reading of the Scroll (Megillah) of Esther, during which the congregation deploys noisemakers (called ''greggers'' in Yiddish) to drown out the name of Haman whenever it is said aloud in the reading of the text. As the Hebrew curse has it, Haman’s name is blotted out —
except to denote pastry. Among Ashkenazi Jews, the festivities traditionally included a ''Purim-shpil'', a folk play based on the Purim story or contemporary subjects.{{efn|For a study of the reception of a Purim-shpil performed in the aftermath of World War II, see Aronowicz.{{sfn|Aronwicz|2008}} For a general discussion of the Yiddish folk dramas performed at Purim, see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett{{sfn|Kirshenblatt-Gimblett|1980}} and “''Purim-Shpil'',” ''Encyclopaedia Judaica''.{{sfn|Purim-Shpil|2007}}}} Crossing genre borders, I now propose to read ''Castle'' as a type of Purim entertainment, a ''shpil'' in long prose narrative form that carries the heavy burden of invoking not a catastrophe averted but a catastrophe perpetrated.

First, a disclaimer is in order. ''Castle'' can be read in the context of the retributive charivari of Purim without exaggerating the novel’s Jewish dimensions or Mailer’s engagement with Judaism.{{efn|For various and valuable insights into Mailer’s role as a Jewish writer, see Bernstein,{{sfn|Bernstein|2007}} Cappell,{{sfn|Cappell|2007}} and Siegel.{{sfn|Siegel|2007}}}} In fact, it is instructive to consider ''Castle'' in the light of a very different tradition, what one might call the ''locus classicus'' of retributive justice in Western literature, Canto 28 of Dante’s ''Inferno''. There the pilgrim-poet encounters Bertran de Born who, {{pg|305|306}}having severed filial ties between a father and son, is condemned to carry his own severed head. Holding the head by the hair and swinging it like a lantern, Bertran offers a gloss on his gruesome condition: "''Così s’osserva in me lo contrapasso''" (In me you may observe fit punishment). {{efn|Dante, ''Inferno'', 142.{{sfn|Dante Aligieri|2000|p=142}} For explication and sources, see the commentary to 28. 142 in Hollander, ''Princeton Dante Project''.{{sfn|Hollander|2010|p=142}}}} While scholars disagree on the extent to which the penal code of hell is based the principle of ''contrapasso'', it clearly underlies the punishment of Ugolino and Ruggieri in Canto 33.{{efn|For a comprehensive summary of the issues involved in determining whether all the condemned souls receive condign punishment, see Armour.{{sfn|Armour|2000}}}} Recounting how in life he and his sons were imprisoned by Ruggieri and left to starve, Ugolino implies that hunger drove him to cannibalize his children. So now in hell he is condemned to gnaw forever on the head of Ruggieri; the punishment is superbly efficient, at once echoing the crime and exacting vengeance for it. Dante’s ''contrapasso'', his vision of the precise and punctilious infernal justice of retribution, informs the ''Purim-shpil'' extravagance of ''Castle''. Mailer’s close examination of Hitler’s life—the bibliography appended to the novel is extensive—puts mockery in the service of strict accounting, the measure for measure of condign punishment.

For fifty years he had been waiting to write about Hitler, Mailer said in an interview.{{sfn|Lennon|2007}} During that time, as the Third Reich has been examined and reexamined and incorporated into popular culture, Hitler has become, for the general population, more a figure of speech than a historical reality. The psychic havoc (Mailer’s term in ''Advertisements for Myself'' ) caused by the Second World War has morphed into cliché with the concomitant psychic pall, and the condition extends well beyond the Jewish community. So as the historical Hitler dominated most of Europe and caused the deaths of millions, the figurative Hitler still has the power to thwart discourse—mention his name and it kills the conversation.{{efn|For a concise exposition of still unanswered questions about Hitler’s regime, see Lukacs,{{sfn|Lukacs|2010}} especially 86–108.}} And in the bleak confusion and bold incompetence of American political life at the beginning of the twenty-first century, that name was invoked with alarming frequency (deployed, curiously enough, by both ends of the political spectrum).

Taking on the trope of Hitler, the aging Mailer returns to the prophetic mode of his younger self, who believed his vocation lay in becoming “''consecutively more disruptive, more dangerous, and more powerful.''”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=22}} He remains a disruptive writer, making his readers uncomfortable. But ever the great experimentalist of the narrative voice, he chooses now to speak with the mellow cadences of folktale, telling how ''das Waldschloss'', the castle in the forest, came to be where there was neither cas-{{pg|306|307}}tle nor forest, but only the adamantine irony of inmates from Berlin imprisoned in a concentration camp where there had once been a potato field. We do not learn about this ''Waldschloss'' until the end of the novel, when we have already passed through the other adamantine irony of a tale told to avenge crimes committed more than sixty years before. The long delay has its advantage. As we know from an old adage invoked in Mailer’s ''Harlot’s Ghost'': “OSS working undercover in Italy, 1943, did encounter the following piece of Sicilian wisdom: ‘Revenge is a dish that people of taste eat cold.’” {{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=813}} The time is ripe for low temperature retribution.

Mailer’s instrument of revenge is the novel’s first person narrator, the gregarious, ingratiating, and ambitious devil, incarnated as Dieter the S.S. Officer (renamed D.T. during his residence in America—but of that sojourn we are told very little), who played a leading role in fostering, encouraging, and fashioning Hitler. While his boss, the Evil One, or Maestro, has turned his attention to modern technology, Dieter takes the opportunity to avenge a demotion by betraying the covert demonic organization that employed him and reveal how a boy born to an obscure Austrian peasant family became his most famous client. Barbara Probst Solomon has noted that, deliberately or not, in ''The Castle in the Forest'' Mailer “has turned the tables on Hitler. Hitler’s demonic portrait of the Jews, his obsession with their bloodlines, their presumed inherited characteristics, had to be ingested from sources close to him. And Mailer hunts down Adi’s family with the same obsessiveness and belief in inherited characteristics that Hitler did to the Jews.”{{sfn|Solomon|2007|p=225}} Going far beyond subjecting the Hitler family to intense scrutiny, Mailer has contrived to give them an antagonistic writer of an unauthorized biography, a Kitty Kelley gone wild, or—the temptation to say this is irresistible—the biographer from hell. And so Dieter is.

Even earnest biographers run the risk of appropriating the lives of their subjects. For Dieter appropriation is the goal, as we learn from his teasing discussion of the narrative’s genre: “It is more than a memoir and certainly has to be most curious as a biography since it is as privileged as a novel.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=79}} He may argue against the common belief that demonic possession is total but he can also boast of his mastery of the subject: “I live with the confidence that I am in a position to understand Adolf. For the fact is that I know him. I must repeat. I know him top to bottom.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=9}} On the basis of his successful cultivation of Hitler as a client of the Maestro, Dieter rose through the ranks of the infernal hierarchy, and in telling the story afterwards, the de-{{pg|307|308}}moted (can we call him fallen?) devil is not about to give up his rights to the life of a celebrity. Hitler is still Dieter’s intellectual property, one might say, but the vengeance is only incidentally his. Primarily it is ours.

Dieter’s knowledge of his client is indeed extensive. He generously offers readers copious data accessible only to devils (and novelists) about Hitler’s incestuous genealogy, odious conception, and bullied and bullying childhood. He takes pains to describe the workings of infernal plots and ploys to intervene in human life. Yet nothing about the information he imparts tells us why Hitler turned out as he did—why a dysfunctional family, nasty sibling rivalry, and a failed beekeeping venture, unpleasant as they are, should lead to dictatorship, world war, and genocide. For not providing an explanation for Hitler’s evil, Mailer was criticized by some reviewers (Gross, for example).{{sfn|Gross|2007|p=59+}} They missed the point, I believe. Such criticism presupposes that ''Castle'' should have offered the kind of catharsis-through-information that one finds in murder mysteries. Yet if we knew what caused Hitler to do what he did, would his deeds suddenly become less horrific?{{efn|For an interesting perspective on the impossibility of establishing causal relations in ''Castle'' and elsewhere, see Fleming.{{sfn|Flemming|2008}}}} It is worth noting that even in ''The Executioner’s Song'', where Mailer is dealing with a mundane criminal, there is also no catharsis-through-information. We wait for Gary Gilmore to explain his motive, to say why he murdered the two men he robbed. But he never does.

As though anticipating the objections of his critics, Mailer has Dieter tease us with details whose later historical echo is unmistakable. Relating how Alois Hitler’s beekeeping mentor, der Alte, set fire to one of his hives, Dieter casually mentions that the young Adi happened to be present but takes care to describe the boy’s sadistic excitement: “His toes tingled, his heart shook in its chamber, he did not know whether to scream or to roar with laughter.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=263}} Since der Alte burns the hive in obedience to instructions sent to him in a dream by the very same Dieter and the boy likewise has been instructed by dream to be at the old man’s farm, can we conclude that this is a formative moment? The devil demurs with a shrug. He had just come back from creating mayhem in Russia, he tells us, and he was not up to the task of dealing with the mind of this particular six-year old (the six-year old who interests us more than the entire Russian royal family). If we were expecting to derive some intellectual or emotional satisfaction from that proffered datum about the young Hitler’s fascination with fiery death and mass slaughter, we are disappointed. Dieter denies us the pleasure.

A balder instance is the large ''Hakenkreuz'' carved into the gate of the {{pg|308|309}}monastery school the young Adi attends. At this point the swastika is not yet an abhorrent political symbol; it is merely the coat of arms of an Abbot von Hagen who may have enjoyed the punning allusion to his name. The gate is the scene of an episode in which the nine-year-old Hitler, caught smoking by one of his teachers who happens to be an important client of the infernal powers, has a chance to hone his skills in manipulation and gives up the idea of becoming a priest. Yet as soon as Dieter brings the tantalizing description of the school archway to our attention, he warns us against rushing to conclusions: “Not too much, I hasten to add, should be made of this. Von Hagen’s swastika was subtly carved, and so offered no striking suggestion of the phalanxes yet to march beneath that symbol. Nonetheless, there it was, a crooked cross.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=341-42}} The carving is and is not significant; it does and does not foreshadow the goose-stepping hordes.

Although Dieter has a pronounced impish edge, he does not dangle provocative details before his readers merely to amuse himself at their expense. Ambiguity comes with the secret agent’s territory. The nature of his work requires him to move from one blind stratagem to another, rely on sources of varying credibility, and grasp the opportunities that come with occasional bits of good luck. The outcome is always unpredictable and always obscure; cause and effect are blurred.

The infernal organization to which Dieter belongs is, after all, a literary descendant of the CIA in ''Harlot’s Ghost'', and it is instructive to remember Harry Hubbard’s limited knowledge about the Company (as the agents call their organization) and its manifold machinations against its ostensible enemy, the KGB. Applying the same kind of intellectual limitations to his private life, Hubbard remains unaware of the state of his own floundering marriage. Wandering for decades in a maze of disguises, disinformation, cryptonyms, letters, messages, and fragments of poetry, he finally tries to extricate himself by writing a memoir in two disjointed manuscripts, Alpha and Omega (the other twenty-two letters of the Greek alphabet coming between them, it is unlikely the two parts will ever fit together). Hubbard’s hapless ignorance is institution-wide. Hugh Montague may be the master of literary cryptograms, but his monologue after the Kennedy assassination reveals (in a moment of black humor) his true ignorance as he tries to cover his tracks without knowing precisely where his tracks are. His desperate self-vindication is worthy of one of Robert Browning’s soliloquizing madmen. Always more vulnerable than his superior, Harry even worries that {{pg|309|310}}through the convoluted webs of intrigue he has set in motion, he himself might ultimately be culpable.{{efn|For the “radical indeterminacy” of ''Harlot’s Ghost'', see Anshen, 457.{{sfn|Anshen|2008|p=457}}}}

A supernatural veneer is, evidently, no protection against the ethos of ignorance inherent in covert agencies. Dieter is better informed than Harry only in that, Socratically, he knows how little he knows, admitting (while still status conscious): “I am about as much endowed beyond an accomplished scholar as he in turn is more knowledgeable than a clod from a poorly endowed school.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=236}} To the agent who must traverse the murky terrain of the human mind, that academic advantage counts for very little. And, again, like his human counterpart, Dieter is deliberately kept ignorant by his employer: “In truth, I do not know much about hell. I am not even certain it exists. The Maestro has kept us, after all, in enclaves. We are not supposed to know what we do not need to know.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=385}} Dieter must entertain the possibility that the Maestro is not even the Devil himself, but merely another one of the many infernal bureaucrats. Compartmentalization keeps the agents wandering in the labyrinth of their assigned enclaves.

Dieter is, then, no better than a CIA agent at charting his own success or foreseeing the future course of history (and perhaps the Maestro and his archenemy, the Dummkopf, are also limited in this respect). After the young Adi helps his father gas a hive of sick bees, the boy is sent a dream etching in which he is given an assignment to count the dead insects. Laying them out in rows, he takes pride in counting four thousand dead before the dream is interrupted. But again Dieter adds a caveat against hasty conclusions and reiterates the uncertainty of the outcome:
<blockquote>Here, I would warn the reader not to make too much of the gassing nor the body count. It is not to be understood as the unique cause of all that came later. For a dream-etching... leaves but a dot upon your psyche, a footprint to anticipate a future sequence of development that may or may not come to pass in future decades. Most dream-etchings are not unlike the abandoned foundations one can see on the outskirts of Third World cities. Left to molder for lack of further funds, they lie there, excavations on a scraggly field.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=201}}</blockquote>
As spies plant information and pay informants, so devils etch dreams, but not all of their schemes come to fruition. {{pg|310|311}}

Christopher Ricks has noted that in the descriptions of Alois Hitler’s attempts to become a beekeeper “there are glimpses of something that might have been other, a world of which one would not have had to despair.”{{sfn|Ricks|2007|p=208}} The beehives are a vision not only of a naturally thriving world but of a communal life otherwise unavailable to the Hitler family. Beyond Alois’s visits to the local tavern and, later, an occasional ''Bürgerabend'', there is only hearth and home, subject to frequent changes of address. One might be able to consider the beekeeping episodes as a kind of counterplot (as Geoffrey Hartman called that sense of an omnipresent divine providence protecting creation in ''Paradise Lost'', especially those redemptive images embedded in the pastoral similes in Books I and II) if, in the shadow of the Waldschloss, one could imagine good coming out of evil. But no, there is neither divine providence nor protection in this castle in this forest, even within the confines of a figure of speech.

If there is a counterplot in ''Castle'', it tends toward retribution, not redemption. By modeling the structure of the Maestro’s infernal organization on the CIA of ''Harlot’s Ghost'', Mailer has assured that Hitler will be denied centrality in his own life story. He will be groomed, honed, tricked out for whatever task his handler deems necessary; he will be scrupulously manipulated; but personally he will matter not at all. It is consistent with the nature of Dieter’s work that he should resist calling any episode in little Adi’s life formative. Intelligence work is like that—uncertain and inconclusive. Dieter’s caveats may give us, painfully, a glimpse of another world, one in which his schemes failed, but in our world, where they succeeded, the absence of formative experiences works towards the progressive diminution of Hitler. Very simply, if fashioning the Führer required hard demonic labor, then we can smile sarcastically along with Dieter as he listens to Himmler expound on Hitler’s superhuman Will and Vision and the rest of the pseudo- political, pseudo-philosophical notions dear to Nazi hearts. Superhuman Will and Vision? Dieter must think the mortals fools. Does Himmler have any idea how many demon-hours (evidently the infernal clocks are not set by eternity) were required to make all those dream etchings (and some of them went nowhere) in Hitler’s brain?

In that light, the coronation of Czar Nicholas II in Book VIII becomes a necessary detour away from rural Austria rather than a digression from Hitler’s biography. In St. Petersburg and at Khodynskoe, the Maestro’s agents are preparing the way for the Bolshevik Revolution and ultimately Stalin, {{pg|311|312}}and one need not indulge in alternative history to see how Hitler’s career depends on their success. The eastern assignment is evidently so important to the demonic designs that it boosts Dieter’s career: “I can vouch that the eight months I lived in Russia from late 1895 to the early summer of 1896 became a prominent element in my development as a high devil.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=213}} But—more diminution—as the reader well knows, Dieter’s Russian strategy also leads to the entry of the Red Army into Berlin and Hitler’s suicide and fiery end.

The diminution of Hitler does not depend solely on future events. In his capacity as biographer from hell, Dieter works against his subject from the beginning, cutting Hitler down to size even as he narrates his life story. Narcissistic and reflexively competitive, Dieter does not gladly share the spotlight with his young charge and his contempt is palpable. (We already know from ''Harlot’s Ghost'' that it is de rigueur for intelligence agents to despise the clients they cultivate). “I, too, am a protagonist,”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=213}} Dieter is quick to remind us. He presents his client as a boy devoid of any admirable qualities, except a talent for war games, the skill that damns him by bringing him to the attention of the Evil One. Otherwise Adi is an unappealing, fearful egotist enamored of power and brute force. Moreover, he suffers from that traditional affliction of the Evil One’s clients, a sulphurous smell. Every so often, Dieter reminds us that the little boy stinks; it is a gratuitous detail, mean and petty, but also funny. Adi is eventually shown to be completely loathsome in his jealousy (possibly murderous—Dieter hedges his bet here) towards his younger brother, the angelic Edmund whose death almost brings a smattering of human emotion to the demon. Compared with Adi, even Alois Senior and Junior, despite their crude appetites, cruelty, and violence, seem recognizably human.

If he demurs on the formative experiences in Adi’s life, Dieter is considerably less reluctant to disclose the requisite personality traits he nurtures in him. He begins by feeding the boy’s vanity, feeding it so well that every incident in his harsh, claustrophobic life is measured by an increase or decrease in his quantity of self-esteem. A stepbrother runs away from home, a brother dies, and Adi is chiefly concerned with his place in the family hierarchy, delighting when he becomes, first, the eldest son, then the only son. Through dreams, Dieter ensures that his young charge believes he has a special destiny, a belief completely contradicted by daytime evidence. The woozy nationalism of the late nineteenth century is seductive and, before long, the {{pg|312|313}}boy links his desperate and defiant sense of personal destiny to that of the ''Volk''. Following an adolescent outburst against both the prevailing prudery and his own sexual disgust, the young Hitler reads Treitschke in a school text and becomes mesmerized by a hyperbolic passage about the mystery and majesty of the German people. He barely understands the words but he is certain they are true. At this juncture, Dieter points menacingly toward the future: “We devils have known for a long time that a mediocre mind, once devoted to one mystical idea, can obtain a mental confidence well beyond its normal potential.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=447}} This is a contemptuous assessment from a biographer who thoroughly knows his subject—and a depressing thought, but true.

To complement his self-induced grandiosity, the young Hitler is schooled by Dieter in the fine art of data selection. When he receives failing grades at the Realschule, the boy convinces himself—with help from his handler—that his failure is actually a sign of intellectual superiority. In a compensatory fantasy, he envisions himself as a schoolteacher giving a lecture on the secret of true learning: “Do not try to remember all the facts of every historical event.... Most of the facts you have memorized are no better than debris which contradict other facts. So you will be in a state of confusion.... Select only those facts which clarify the issues.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=419}} This skill will obviously prove useful in Hitler’s later career. It is, incidentally, worth noting that here Mailer has slyly summarized a basic tool of bad governance, popular with a great many leaders besides Hitler. (One would very much like to know where D.T., the American incarnation of the narrating devil who was once Dieter, would have directed his attention on this side of the Atlantic. But those episodes belong to a subsequent volume that Mailer did not live to write.)

By the time of the ''Realschule'' failures, Dieter has already used Adi’s twin obsessions with primogeniture and patriarchy to prepare him for the apotheosis of data selection—a lifetime of mendacity. (Curiously enough, although he was once reviled by feminists, in ''The Castle in the Forest'' Mailer offers a stunningly cold dissection of patriarchy and its discontents.) When Alois Senior savagely attacks his eldest son, Dieter deploys his infernal machinations to make the terrified little Adi believe that he himself was the victim, and Hitler spends the rest of his life believing that his father almost beat him to death. Through the false memory, Dieter lays the groundwork for an entire edifice of lies: “this fiction would enable me to develop Adi’s future incapacity to tell the truth. By the time his political career began, he was in command of an artwork of lies elaborate enough to support his smallest {{pg|313|314}}need. He could shave the truth by a hair or subvert it altogether.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=316}} If it were any man but Hitler, the pathos of a bogus Oedipal struggle (a hated stepbrother acting as surrogate to confront the vengeful father where three roads meet) would merit pity.

Or, there would be pity, if the narrator were someone other than Dieter. Although he is an immensely entertaining story-teller, he ''is'' a devil, cut off from the full range of human experience, his emotional vocabulary accurate only when expressing combative, competitive egotism. It is useful here to remember how one of Dieter’s literary ancestors, Milton’s Satan, becomes so distracted by Eve’s beauty that for a moment he loses his hate and envy and stands there, abstracted from his usual evil, “Stupidly good.”{{sfn|Milton|1957|p=465}} Dumb passivity is as close as Satan gets to understanding Eden and prelapsarian experience; the local animals and even the plants have richer emotional lives than he does. For his part, Dieter is well-acquainted with envy, self-pity, ambition, lust, physical pain and pleasure. But compassion, longing, sorrow, remorse and love are unfamiliar to him, except in a reductive sense: “we do look for the lowest common denominator to any truth.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=99}}

Dieter’s truncated psyche gets him (that is, his S.S. officer incarnation) killed in the Waldschloss. As he tells it, the Jewish psychiatrist who interrogates him is upset by the pestilential effluvia and the shouts of the liberated prisoners and seeks out Dieter’s company because they are both high-ranking officers. Dieter must have engaged in some extremely obtuse data selection because he has egregiously misjudged the situation. The American has just encountered immeasurably greater horrors than a few bad smells and as a Jew is probably taking the horrors personally. But empathy is so alien to Dieter that he makes the fatal mistake of pretending to be conscience-stricken. (An argument could be made that Dieter is clueless here because he has been wearing the S.S. uniform for so long that even the vestigial sensibilities of a demon have atrophied.) The sense that Dieter gets what he deserves is inescapable.

At that moment, we are abruptly reminded that Dieter is not an impartial narrator nor a reliable one, and we have been of (and at) the devil’s party, amusing ourselves as we watch the heartless education of a wretched little boy in the arts of lying and self-deception. In 1940, in ''The Great Dictator'', Charlie Chaplin imagined Hitler subsumed by a double, an anonymous Jewish barber. What Chaplin began before Hitler was fully yet the murderer he would be-{{pg|314|315}}come, Mailer completes after the fact. Hitler is subsumed by his biographer, the slick Dieter, good at schmoozing and imprinting his own image on his clients. Significantly, Dieter appropriates the soul of the young Hitler without temptation, without the flattery and bogus promises of wealth, power, knowledge, or beautiful women that are the stock-in-trade ploy of the devil. It is possible a temptation scene might have figured in a later episode in a subsequent volume, but that is idle speculation. In the novel as we have it, Dieter so overshadows his client that he effectively blots him out.

As we know from Aristotle, history merely tells us what happened, poetry what might have happened. There is reason to believe (or hope) that if what might have happened is well told enough, the way we perceive what happened changes. Isn’t Napoleon’s invasion of Russia forever defined by Tolstoy and World War I by Hemingway? Then there is a chance—the odds unknown—that some years hence, the popular view of Hitler will be shaped by Mailer’s novel. Hitler, the man of millennial urges who dominated the twentieth-century, reduced to a powerless stick figure—that would be exemplary ''contrapasso'', retributive justice meted out by literature, as though ''The Castle'' were a ''roman à clef'', albeit one written to redress historical rather than private grievances.

Meanwhile, for the present, does the novel-cum-''Purim-shpil'' change anything? If Mailer was correct in his letter to Jack Henry Abbot and my existence was stunted by Hitler, am I less stunted for having read ''Castle in the Forest''?

I resort to another autobiographical vignette.

Some months after my husband gave me ''Castle'' as a Purim gift, we were in a bookstore again, but not, as before, in a strip mall in Pittsburgh. This time we were in a shop near the chic Kärtnerstrasse, close to the street where I was born in Vienna. I had recently had a landmark birthday and it was my husband’s idea that we celebrate it there. After a lifetime of ambivalence about my natal city, I had hesitated. But since he had never really seen Vienna and it has the reputation of being one of the most livable cities in the world, I agreed to go.

On a table, among the new selections, was a stack of books entitled ''Das Schloss im Wald''. I picked up one of the books, thumbed through it, handed it to my husband. We exchanged sly glances. For my purposes, the timing of the German translation of ''The Castle in the Forest'' couldn’t have been more fortuitous.

A clerk was watching us. He had that wonderfully welcoming face that so {{pg|315|316}}many young Austrians have but I thought his expression implied more—a chance, perhaps, to discuss the new book with a couple of Americans.

The possibility of a literary chat was intriguing. Austria was late in addressing its Nazi past, but when it finally did, it undertook the work with commendable seriousness. I had just been to see the inverted blank concrete books of the Holocaust memorial on Judenplatz. It was, I thought, a solemn act of piety.

''“Nein, danke,”'' I shook my head and smiled at the young clerk. I didn’t need any help.

And I didn’t. I could forgo the chat. On the table in front of me I had everything I wanted. The desire for retribution is atavistic, unattractive, and yet undeniable. For the Austrians, concrete books, unwritten and unreadable, made a fit monument. But ''Das Schloss im Wald'', Mailer’s self-razing biography of Hitler, was fit for me.

Yes, Vienna was one of the most livable cities, as well as one of the prettiest. For the first time, I allowed myself to feel the familiar comfort of a childhood home and it was sweet, like ''hamantaschen''.

''I wish to thank Elemer Boreczky, Gloria Erlich, and Carol Holmes for their comments on this essay.''

=== Notes ===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|20em}}

===Works Cited===
{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}
* {{cite journal |last=Anshen |first=David |title=The New Politics of Form in ''Harlot's Ghost'' |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2 |issue=1 |date=2008 |pages=452-73 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Armour |first=Peter |date=2000 |chapter=Dante's ''Contrapasso'': Contexts and Texts |title= Italian Studies |volume=55 |pages=1-20 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Aronowicz |first=Annette |title=''Homens Mapole:'' Hope in the Immediate Postwar Period|url=https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/article/241585|journal=Jewish Quarterly Review |volume=98 |issue=3 |date=2008 |publisher=Project Muse |pages=355-88 |access-date=22 June 2010 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Bernstein |first=Mashey |title=In a Different Way, Norman Mailer Was a Deeply Jewish Writer |url=https://www.proquest.com/docview/194676510/533257E80CD3408CPQ/1?sourcetype=Magazines |journal=Deep South Jewish Voice |volume=18 |issue=1 |date=Dec 2007 |publisher=ProQuest |pages=100–101 |access-date=3 Mar 2009 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Cappell |first=Ezra |date=Nov 2007 |title=Norman Mailer: A Man of Letters Inspired by the People of the Book |url=https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/norman-mailer-man-letters-inspired-people-book/docview/367855341/se-2 |work=Forward |volume=16 |location= |publisher=ProQuest |page=A1 |access-date=3 Mar 2009 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Coetzee |first=J. M. |date=15 Feb 2007 |title=Portrait of the Monster as a Young Artist |magazine=New York Review of Books |volume=54 |issue=2 |pages=8–11 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dante Alighieri |date=2000 |title=Inferno |translator=Robert and Jean Hollander |location=New York |publisher=Doubleday |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Fleming |first=James R. |title='But Where is the Castle?':The Function of Modernist Allegory in Norman
Mailer's ''The Castle in the Forest'' |url=https://cdn.wildapricot.com/209073/resources/impost/volumes/EAPSU%20Online%20-%20Volume%20Five.pdf?version=1465494662000&Policy=eyJTdGF0ZW1lbnQiOiBbeyJSZXNvdXJjZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vY2RuLndpbGRhcHJpY290LmNvbS8yMDkwNzMvcmVzb3VyY2VzL2ltcG9zdC92b2x1bWVzL0VBUFNVJTIwT25saW5lJTIwLSUyMFZvbHVtZSUyMEZpdmUucGRmP3ZlcnNpb249MTQ2NTQ5NDY2MjAwMCIsIkNvbmRpdGlvbiI6eyJEYXRlTGVzc1RoYW4iOnsiQVdTOkVwb2NoVGltZSI6MTc0MzQ2ODc3NX0sIklwQWRkcmVzcyI6eyJBV1M6U291cmNlSXAiOiIwLjAuMC4wLzAifX19XX0_&Signature=CzNUJE~LVXu1ScnPUaKX8js3Pw74M8XKUIhIwjPNXcTQvPeq6UASgLR3xhri3Zo5OPJt439qiY9ieBNTwsTOScvbVO9hl0YYebHZkCqn0eMmuFpqVifJn20eXUDfphI8PIeUCA4kMe6LYogWH4OJuKTRp9Efdas1ppdinvl0vtTXEp6B8oszT4Wx2xPSOAco9YmyyHQL5K6oPAIboQBEYMDOAR1J0Ag0zOIRQkevsAtBBKDdvYlBlprxzJDwV0iGW5Mas-Vzn8Eprss-nFvsMyK0A0st7P0mWnBx0LJvOD4xUygRl2bl7Mp0-WqDkzQ9ubaQP53bSRnIdAmxkZrIOA__&Key-Pair-Id=K27MGQSHTHAGGF |journal=EAPSU Online |volume=5 |date=Fall 2008 |pages=143–55 |access-date=11 July 2010 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Gross |first=John |date=2007 |title="Young Adolf." Rev. of ''The Castle in the Forest.'' |url=https://www.commentary.org/articles/john-gross/the-castle-in-the-forest-by-norman-mailer/ |magazine=Commentary |volume=123 |issue=3 |location=Expanded Academic ASAP |page=59+ |access-date=23 Apr 2010 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Hartman |first=Geoffrey |title=Milton's Counterplot |journal=ELH |volume=28 |issue=1 |date=1958 |pages=1-12 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite web |url=https://etcweb.princeton.edu/ |title=Princeton Dante Project |last1=Hollander |last2=Robert |display-authors=etal |access-date=25 Feb 2010 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kirshenblatt-Gimblett |first=Barbara |date=1980 |title=Contraband: Performance, Text and Analysis of a ''Purim-shpil'' |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/i247940 |journal=Drama Review |volume=24 |issue=3 |publisher=JSTOR |pages=5-16 |doi= |access-date=17 Jan 2009 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lukacs |first=John |date=2010 |title=The Legacy of the Second World War |location=New Haven |publisher=Yale University Press |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |location=New York |publisher=Putnam |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1991 |title=Harlot’s Ghost |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}
* {{cite web |title=Interview by Michael Lennon |url=https://www.bookreporter.com/authors/au-mailer-norman.asp |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=23 Feb 2007 |website=Bookreporter.com |publisher= |access-date=3 Mar 2009 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |title=Norman Mailer: Letters to Jack Abbott |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/03/12/norman-mailer-letters-to-jack-abbott/ |journal=New York Review of Books ||volume=56 |issue=4 |date=12 March 2009 |pages=n. pag. |access-date=7 Aug 2010 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Milton |first=John |date=1957 |title=Paradise Lost. Complete Poems and Major Prose |editor-last1=Hughes |editor-first1=Merritt |location=New York |publisher=Odyssey Press |pages=173–469 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite encyclopedia |date=2007 |title=Purim-Shpil |encyclopedia=Encyclopaedia Judaica |edition= 2nd |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Ricks |first=Christopher |title=The Devil Only Knows |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |date=2007 |pages=206–214 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Siegel |first=Lee |date=21 Jan 2007 |title=Maestro of the Human Ego. Rev. of ''The Castle in the Forest'', by Norman Mailer |url= https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/books/review/Siegel.t.html |work=New York Times |publisher=New York Times |access-date=22 Apr 2010 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Solomon |first=Barbara Probst |title=Mailer’s Choice |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |date=2007 |pages=223–28 |ref=harv }}
{{refend}}

{{Review|state=expanded}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengence in ''The Castle in the Forrest'', The}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

User:Maggiemrogers/sandbox

2025-04-01T02:40:34Z

Maggiemrogers: working on works cited and citations

This autobiographical vignette serves a purpose: there was uncanny pre- science in linking Purim to ''Castle in the Forest''. The holiday celebrates the salvation of the Persian Jews in the Fifth Century BCE from a plot by Haman, the king’s evil advisor, to have the entire community slaughtered. The Book of Esther tells how, with the help of her kinsman Mordechai, she uses her wits and her beauty to foil Haman’s plans. By the king’s decree, victors and victims undergo a swift reversal of fortune. Haman’s plot recoils back on him and he ends up on the very same gallows he had prepared for Mordechai. Meanwhile, the Jews of the realm, permitted to arm themselves, attack and kill Haman’s followers. For the Jews, sorrow is turned to joy and a day of mourning to a festival.

The only boisterous holiday in the Hebrew calendar, Purim is not unlike Carnival in using masks and costumes and giving license to rowdy behavior. That the history of the Jews is replete with other plots against them that do not end so well does not diminish the festivity of Purim; perhaps it only increases it. Through the feasting and merrymaking, the retribution against Haman is reenacted as mockery. Most Americans in urban areas are probably familiar with the special Purim pastries, poppy seed or fruit-filled triangular tarts called ''hamantaschen'', Haman’s pockets, made popular by Eastern European Jewish immigrants. In the synagogue, the holiday is celebrated by a public reading of the Scroll (Megillah) of Esther, during which the congregation deploys noisemakers (called ''greggers'' in Yiddish) to drown out the name of Haman whenever it is said aloud in the reading of the text. As the Hebrew curse has it, Haman’s name is blotted out —
except to denote pastry. Among Ashkenazi Jews, the festivities traditionally included a ''Purim-shpil'', a folk play based on the Purim story or contemporary subjects.{{efn|For a study of the reception of a Purim-shpil performed in the aftermath of World War II, see Aronowicz. For a general discussion of the Yiddish folk dramas performed at Purim, see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and “''Purim-Shpil'',” ''Encyclopaedia Judaica''.}} Crossing genre borders, I now propose to read ''Castle'' as a type of Purim entertainment, a ''shpil'' in long prose narrative form that carries the heavy burden of invoking not a catastrophe averted but a catastrophe perpetrated.

First, a disclaimer is in order. ''Castle'' can be read in the context of the retributive charivari of Purim without exaggerating the novel’s Jewish dimensions or Mailer’s engagement with Judaism.{{efn|For various and valuable insights into Mailer’s role as a Jewish writer, see Bernstein, Cappell, and Siegel.}} In fact, it is instructive to consider ''Castle'' in the light of a very different tradition, what one might call the ''locus classicus'' of retributive justice in Western literature, Canto 28 of Dante’s ''Inferno''. There the pilgrim-poet encounters Bertran de Born who, having severed filial ties between a father and son, is condemned to carry his own severed head. Holding the head by the hair and swinging it like a lantern, Bertran offers a gloss on his gruesome condition: "''Così s’osserva in me lo contrapasso''" (In me you may observe fit punishment). {{efn|Dante, ''Inferno'', 142. For explication and sources, see the commentary to 28. 142 in Hollander, ''Princeton Dante Project''.}} While scholars disagree on the extent to which the penal code of hell is based the principle of ''contrapasso'', it clearly underlies the punishment of Ugolino and Ruggieri in Canto 33.{{efn|For a comprehensive summary of the issues involved in determining whether all the condemned souls receive condign punishment, see Armour.}} Recounting how in life he and his sons were imprisoned by Ruggieri and left to starve, Ugolino implies that hunger drove him to cannibalize his children. So now in hell he is condemned to gnaw forever on the head of Ruggieri; the punishment is superbly efficient, at once echoing the crime and exacting vengeance for it. Dante’s ''contrapasso'', his vision of the precise and punctilious infernal justice of retribution, informs the ''Purim-shpil'' extravagance of ''Castle''. Mailer’s close examination of Hitler’s life—the bibliography appended to the novel is extensive—puts mockery in the service of strict accounting, the measure for measure of condign punishment.

For fifty years he had been waiting to write about Hitler, Mailer said in an interview (Lennon 2007). During that time, as the Third Reich has been examined and reexamined and incorporated into popular culture, Hitler has become, for the general population, more a figure of speech than a historical reality. The psychic havoc (Mailer’s term in ''Advertisements for Myself'' ) caused by the Second World War has morphed into cliché with the concomitant psychic pall, and the condition extends well beyond the Jewish community. So as the historical Hitler dominated most of Europe and caused the deaths of millions, the figurative Hitler still has the power to thwart discourse—mention his name and it kills the conversation.{{efn|For a concise exposition of still unanswered questions about Hitler’s regime, see Lukacs, especially 86–108.}} And in the bleak confusion and bold incompetence of American political life at the beginning of the twenty-first century, that name was invoked with alarming frequency (deployed, curiously enough, by both ends of the political spectrum).

Taking on the trope of Hitler, the aging Mailer returns to the prophetic mode of his younger self, who believed his vocation lay in becoming “''consecutively more disruptive, more dangerous, and more powerful''" (''Advertisements for Myself'' 22). He remains a disruptive writer, making his readers uncomfortable. But ever the great experimentalist of the narrative voice, he chooses now to speak with the mellow cadences of folktale, telling how ''das Waldschloss'', the castle in the forest, came to be where there was neither castle nor forest, but only the adamantine irony of inmates from Berlin imprisoned in a concentration camp where there had once been a potato field. We do not learn about this ''Waldschloss'' until the end of the novel, when we have already passed through the other adamantine irony of a tale told to avenge crimes committed more than sixty years before. The long delay has its advantage. As we know from an old adage invoked in Mailer’s ''Harlot’s Ghost'': “OSS working undercover in Italy, 1943, did encounter the following piece of Sicilian wisdom: ‘Revenge is a dish that people of taste eat cold.’” (''HG'' 813). The time is ripe for low temperature retribution.

Mailer’s instrument of revenge is the novel’s first person narrator, the gregarious, ingratiating, and ambitious devil, incarnated as Dieter the S.S. Officer (renamed D.T. during his residence in America—but of that sojourn we are told very little), who played a leading role in fostering, encouraging, and fashioning Hitler. While his boss, the Evil One, or Maestro, has turned his attention to modern technology, Dieter takes the opportunity to avenge a demotion by betraying the covert demonic organization that employed him and reveal how a boy born to an obscure Austrian peasant family became his most famous client. Barbara Probst Solomon has noted that, deliberately or not, in ''The Castle in the Forest'' Mailer “has turned the tables on Hitler. Hitler’s demonic portrait of the Jews, his obsession with their bloodlines, their presumed inherited characteristics, had to be ingested from sources close to him. And Mailer hunts down Adi’s family with the same obsessiveness and belief in inherited characteristics that Hitler did to the Jews” (225). Going far beyond subjecting the Hitler family to intense scrutiny, Mailer has contrived to give them an antagonistic writer of an unauthorized biography, a Kitty Kelley gone wild, or—the temptation to say this is irresistible—the biographer from hell. And so Dieter is.

Even earnest biographers run the risk of appropriating the lives of their subjects. For Dieter appropriation is the goal, as we learn from his teasing discussion of the narrative’s genre: “It is more than a memoir and certainly has to be most curious as a biography since it is as privileged as a novel ” (79). He may argue against the common belief that demonic possession is total but he can also boast of his mastery of the subject: “I live with the confidence that I am in a position to understand Adolf. For the fact is that I know him. I must repeat. I know him top to bottom” (9). On the basis of his successful cultivation of Hitler as a client of the Maestro, Dieter rose through the ranks of the infernal hierarchy, and in telling the story afterwards, the demoted (can we call him fallen?) devil is not about to give up his rights to the life of a celebrity. Hitler is still Dieter’s intellectual property, one might say, but the vengeance is only incidentally his. Primarily it is ours.

Dieter’s knowledge of his client is indeed extensive. He generously offers readers copious data accessible only to devils (and novelists) about Hitler’s incestuous genealogy, odious conception, and bullied and bullying childhood. He takes pains to describe the workings of infernal plots and ploys to intervene in human life. Yet nothing about the information he imparts tells us why Hitler turned out as he did—why a dysfunctional family, nasty sibling rivalry, and a failed beekeeping venture, unpleasant as they are, should lead to dictatorship, world war, and genocide. For not providing an explanation for Hitler’s evil, Mailer was criticized by some reviewers (Gross, for example). They missed the point, I believe. Such criticism presupposes that ''Castle'' should have offered the kind of catharsis-through-information that one finds in murder mysteries. Yet if we knew what caused Hitler to do what he did, would his deeds suddenly become less horrific?{{efn|For an interesting perspective on the impossibility of establishing causal relations in ''Castle'' and elsewhere, see Fleming.}} It is worth noting that even in ''The Executioner’s Song'', where Mailer is dealing with a mundane criminal, there is also no catharsis-through-information. We wait for Gary Gilmore to explain his motive, to say why he murdered the two men he robbed. But he never does.

As though anticipating the objections of his critics, Mailer has Dieter tease us with details whose later historical echo is unmistakable. Relating how Alois Hitler’s beekeeping mentor, der Alte, set fire to one of his hives, Dieter casually mentions that the young Adi happened to be present but takes care to describe the boy’s sadistic excitement: “His toes tingled, his heart shook in its chamber, he did not know whether to scream or to roar with laughter” (263). Since der Alte burns the hive in obedience to instructions sent to him in a dream by the very same Dieter and the boy likewise has been instructed by dream to be at the old man’s farm, can we conclude that this is a formative moment? The devil demurs with a shrug. He had just come back from creating mayhem in Russia, he tells us, and he was not up to the task of dealing with the mind of this particular six-year old (the six-year old who interests us more than the entire Russian royal family). If we were expecting to derive some intellectual or emotional satisfaction from that proffered datum about the young Hitler’s fascination with fiery death and mass slaughter, we are disappointed. Dieter denies us the pleasure.

A balder instance is the large ''Hakenkreuz'' carved into the gate of the monastery school the young Adi attends. At this point the swastika is not yet an abhorrent political symbol; it is merely the coat of arms of an Abbot von Hagen who may have enjoyed the punning allusion to his name. The gate is the scene of an episode in which the nine-year-old Hitler, caught smoking by one of his teachers who happens to be an important client of the infernal powers, has a chance to hone his skills in manipulation and gives up the idea of becoming a priest. Yet as soon as Dieter brings the tantalizing description of the school archway to our attention, he warns us against rushing to conclusions: “Not too much, I hasten to add, should be made of this. Von Hagen’s swastika was subtly carved, and so offered no striking suggestion of the phalanxes yet to march beneath that symbol. Nonetheless, there it was, a crooked cross” (341-42). The carving is and is not significant; it does and does not foreshadow the goose-stepping hordes.

Although Dieter has a pronounced impish edge, he does not dangle provocative details before his readers merely to amuse himself at their expense. Ambiguity comes with the secret agent’s territory. The nature of his work requires him to move from one blind stratagem to another, rely on sources of varying credibility, and grasp the opportunities that come with occasional bits of good luck. The outcome is always unpredictable and always obscure; cause and effect are blurred.

The infernal organization to which Dieter belongs is, after all, a literary descendant of the CIA in ''Harlot’s Ghost'', and it is instructive to remember Harry Hubbard’s limited knowledge about the Company (as the agents call their organization) and its manifold machinations against its ostensible enemy, the KGB. Applying the same kind of intellectual limitations to his private life, Hubbard remains unaware of the state of his own floundering marriage. Wandering for decades in a maze of disguises, disinformation, cryptonyms, letters, messages, and fragments of poetry, he finally tries to extricate himself by writing a memoir in two disjointed manuscripts, Alpha and Omega (the other twenty-two letters of the Greek alphabet coming between them, it is unlikely the two parts will ever fit together). Hubbard’s hapless ignorance is institution-wide. Hugh Montague may be the master of literary cryptograms, but his monologue after the Kennedy assassination reveals (in a moment of black humor) his true ignorance as he tries to cover his tracks without knowing precisely where his tracks are. His desperate self-vindication is worthy of one of Robert Browning’s soliloquizing madmen. Always more vulnerable than his superior, Harry even worries that through the convoluted webs of intrigue he has set in motion, he himself might ultimately be culpable.{{efn|For the “radical indeterminacy” of ''Harlot’s Ghost'', see Anshen, 457.}}

A supernatural veneer is, evidently, no protection against the ethos of ignorance inherent in covert agencies. Dieter is better informed than Harry only in that, Socratically, he knows how little he knows, admitting (while still status conscious): “I am about as much endowed beyond an accomplished scholar as he in turn is more knowledgeable than a clod from a poorly endowed school” (236). To the agent who must traverse the murky terrain of the human mind, that academic advantage counts for very little. And, again, like his human counterpart, Dieter is deliberately kept ignorant by his employer: “In truth, I do not know much about hell. I am not even certain it exists. The Maestro has kept us, after all, in enclaves. We are not supposed to know what we do not need to know” (385). Dieter must entertain the possibility that the Maestro is not even the Devil himself, but merely another one of the many infernal bureaucrats. Compartmentalization keeps the agents wandering in the labyrinth of their assigned enclaves.

Dieter is, then, no better than a CIA agent at charting his own success or foreseeing the future course of history (and perhaps the Maestro and his archenemy, the Dummkopf, are also limited in this respect). After the young Adi helps his father gas a hive of sick bees, the boy is sent a dream etching in which he is given an assignment to count the dead insects. Laying them out in rows, he takes pride in counting four thousand dead before the dream is interrupted. But again Dieter adds a caveat against hasty conclusions and reiterates the uncertainty of the outcome:
<blockquote>Here, I would warn the reader not to make too much of the gassing nor the body count. It is not to be understood as the unique cause of all that came later. For a dream-etching... leaves but a dot upon your psyche, a footprint to anticipate a future sequence of development that may or may not come to pass in future decades. Most dream-etchings are not unlike the abandoned foundations one can see on the outskirts of Third World cities. Left to molder for lack of further funds, they lie there, excavations on a scraggly field. (201)</blockquote>
As spies plant information and pay informants, so devils etch dreams, but not all of their schemes come to fruition.

Christopher Ricks has noted that in the descriptions of Alois Hitler’s attempts to become a beekeeper “there are glimpses of something that might have been other, a world of which one would not have had to despair” (208). The beehives are a vision not only of a naturally thriving world but of a communal life otherwise unavailable to the Hitler family. Beyond Alois’s visits to the local tavern and, later, an occasional ''Bürgerabend'', there is only hearth and home, subject to frequent changes of address. One might be able to consider the beekeeping episodes as a kind of counterplot (as Geoffrey Hartman called that sense of an omnipresent divine providence protecting creation in ''Paradise Lost'', especially those redemptive images embedded in the pastoral similes in Books I and II) if, in the shadow of the Waldschloss, one could imagine good coming out of evil. But no, there is neither divine providence nor protection in this castle in this forest, even within the confines of a figure of speech.

If there is a counterplot in ''Castle'', it tends toward retribution, not redemption. By modeling the structure of the Maestro’s infernal organization on the CIA of ''Harlot’s Ghost'', Mailer has assured that Hitler will be denied centrality in his own life story. He will be groomed, honed, tricked out for whatever task his handler deems necessary; he will be scrupulously manipulated; but personally he will matter not at all. It is consistent with the nature of Dieter’s work that he should resist calling any episode in little Adi’s life formative. Intelligence work is like that—uncertain and inconclusive. Dieter’s caveats may give us, painfully, a glimpse of another world, one in which his schemes failed, but in our world, where they succeeded, the absence of formative experiences works towards the progressive diminution of Hitler. Very simply, if fashioning the Führer required hard demonic labor, then we can smile sarcastically along with Dieter as he listens to Himmler expound on Hitler’s superhuman Will and Vision and the rest of the pseudo- political, pseudo-philosophical notions dear to Nazi hearts. Superhuman Will and Vision? Dieter must think the mortals fools. Does Himmler have any idea how many demon-hours (evidently the infernal clocks are not set by eternity) were required to make all those dream etchings (and some of them went nowhere) in Hitler’s brain?

In that light, the coronation of Czar Nicholas II in Book VIII becomes a necessary detour away from rural Austria rather than a digression from Hitler’s biography. In St. Petersburg and at Khodynskoe, the Maestro’s agents are preparing the way for the Bolshevik Revolution and ultimately Stalin, and one need not indulge in alternative history to see how Hitler’s career depends on their success. The eastern assignment is evidently so important to the demonic designs that it boosts Dieter’s career: “I can vouch that the eight months I lived in Russia from late 1895 to the early summer of 1896 became a prominent element in my development as a high devil” (213). But—more diminution—as the reader well knows, Dieter’s Russian strategy also leads to the entry of the Red Army into Berlin and Hitler’s suicide and fiery end.

The diminution of Hitler does not depend solely on future events. In his capacity as biographer from hell, Dieter works against his subject from the beginning, cutting Hitler down to size even as he narrates his life story. Narcissistic and reflexively competitive, Dieter does not gladly share the spotlight with his young charge and his contempt is palpable. (We already know from ''Harlot’s Ghost'' that it is de rigueur for intelligence agents to despise the clients they cultivate). “I, too, am a protagonist” (''CIF'' 213), Dieter is quick to remind us. He presents his client as a boy devoid of any admirable qualities, except a talent for war games, the skill that damns him by bringing him to the attention of the Evil One. Otherwise Adi is an unappealing, fearful egotist enamored of power and brute force. Moreover, he suffers from that traditional affliction of the Evil One’s clients, a sulphurous smell. Every so often, Dieter reminds us that the little boy stinks; it is a gratuitous detail, mean and petty, but also funny. Adi is eventually shown to be completely loathsome in his jealousy (possibly murderous—Dieter hedges his bet here) towards his younger brother, the angelic Edmund whose death almost brings a smattering of human emotion to the demon. Compared with Adi, even Alois Senior and Junior, despite their crude appetites, cruelty, and violence, seem recognizably human.

If he demurs on the formative experiences in Adi’s life, Dieter is considerably less reluctant to disclose the requisite personality traits he nurtures in him. He begins by feeding the boy’s vanity, feeding it so well that every incident in his harsh, claustrophobic life is measured by an increase or decrease in his quantity of self-esteem. A stepbrother runs away from home, a brother dies, and Adi is chiefly concerned with his place in the family hierarchy, delighting when he becomes, first, the eldest son, then the only son. Through dreams, Dieter ensures that his young charge believes he has a special destiny, a belief completely contradicted by daytime evidence. The woozy nationalism of the late nineteenth century is seductive and, before long, the boy links his desperate and defiant sense of personal destiny to that of the ''Volk''. Following an adolescent outburst against both the prevailing prudery and his own sexual disgust, the young Hitler reads Treitschke in a school text and becomes mesmerized by a hyperbolic passage about the mystery and majesty of the German people. He barely understands the words but he is certain they are true. At this juncture, Dieter points menacingly toward the future: “We devils have known for a long time that a mediocre mind, once devoted to one mystical idea, can obtain a mental confidence well beyond its normal potential” (447). This is a contemptuous assessment from a biographer who thoroughly knows his subject—and a depressing thought, but true.

To complement his self-induced grandiosity, the young Hitler is schooled by Dieter in the fine art of data selection. When he receives failing grades at the Realschule, the boy convinces himself—with help from his handler—that his failure is actually a sign of intellectual superiority. In a compensatory fantasy, he envisions himself as a schoolteacher giving a lecture on the secret of true learning: “Do not try to remember all the facts of every historical event.... Most of the facts you have memorized are no better than debris which contradict other facts. So you will be in a state of confusion.... Select only those facts which clarify the issues” (419). This skill will obviously prove useful in Hitler’s later career. It is, incidentally, worth noting that here Mailer has slyly summarized a basic tool of bad governance, popular with a great many leaders besides Hitler. (One would very much like to know where D.T., the American incarnation of the narrating devil who was once Dieter, would have directed his attention on this side of the Atlantic. But those episodes belong to a subsequent volume that Mailer did not live to write.)

By the time of the ''Realschule'' failures, Dieter has already used Adi’s twin obsessions with primogeniture and patriarchy to prepare him for the apotheosis of data selection—a lifetime of mendacity. (Curiously enough, although he was once reviled by feminists, in ''The Castle in the Forest'' Mailer offers a stunningly cold dissection of patriarchy and its discontents.) When Alois Senior savagely attacks his eldest son, Dieter deploys his infernal machinations to make the terrified little Adi believe that he himself was the victim, and Hitler spends the rest of his life believing that his father almost beat him to death. Through the false memory, Dieter lays the groundwork for an entire edifice of lies: “this fiction would enable me to develop Adi’s future incapacity to tell the truth. By the time his political career began, he was in command of an artwork of lies elaborate enough to support his smallest need. He could shave the truth by a hair or subvert it altogether” (316). If it were any man but Hitler, the pathos of a bogus Oedipal struggle (a hated stepbrother acting as surrogate to confront the vengeful father where three roads meet) would merit pity.

Or, there would be pity, if the narrator were someone other than Dieter. Although he is an immensely entertaining story-teller, he ''is'' a devil, cut off from the full range of human experience, his emotional vocabulary accurate only when expressing combative, competitive egotism. It is useful here to remember how one of Dieter’s literary ancestors, Milton’s Satan, becomes so distracted by Eve’s beauty that for a moment he loses his hate and envy and stands there, abstracted from his usual evil, “Stupidly good” (''Paradise Lost'' 9. 465). Dumb passivity is as close as Satan gets to understanding Eden and prelapsarian experience; the local animals and even the plants have richer emotional lives than he does. For his part, Dieter is well-acquainted with envy, self-pity, ambition, lust, physical pain and pleasure. But compassion, longing, sorrow, remorse and love are unfamiliar to him, except in a reductive sense: “we do look for the lowest common denominator to any truth” (Mailer, Castle 99).

Dieter’s truncated psyche gets him (that is, his S.S. officer incarnation) killed in the Waldschloss. As he tells it, the Jewish psychiatrist who interrogates him is upset by the pestilential effluvia and the shouts of the liberated prisoners and seeks out Dieter’s company because they are both high-ranking officers. Dieter must have engaged in some extremely obtuse data selection because he has egregiously misjudged the situation. The American has just encountered immeasurably greater horrors than a few bad smells and as a Jew is probably taking the horrors personally. But empathy is so alien to Dieter that he makes the fatal mistake of pretending to be conscience-stricken. (An argument could be made that Dieter is clueless here because he has been wearing the S.S. uniform for so long that even the vestigial sensibilities of a demon have atrophied.) The sense that Dieter gets what he deserves is inescapable.

At that moment, we are abruptly reminded that Dieter is not an impartial narrator nor a reliable one, and we have been of (and at) the devil’s party, amusing ourselves as we watch the heartless education of a wretched little boy in the arts of lying and self-deception. In 1940, in ''The Great Dictator'', Charlie Chaplin imagined Hitler subsumed by a double, an anonymous Jewish barber. What Chaplin began before Hitler was fully yet the murderer he would become, Mailer completes after the fact. Hitler is subsumed by his biographer, the slick Dieter, good at schmoozing and imprinting his own image on his clients. Significantly, Dieter appropriates the soul of the young Hitler without temptation, without the flattery and bogus promises of wealth, power, knowledge, or beautiful women that are the stock-in-trade ploy of the devil. It is possible a temptation scene might have figured in a later episode in a subsequent volume, but that is idle speculation. In the novel as we have it, Dieter so overshadows his client that he effectively blots him out.

As we know from Aristotle, history merely tells us what happened, poetry what might have happened. There is reason to believe (or hope) that if what might have happened is well told enough, the way we perceive what happened changes. Isn’t Napoleon’s invasion of Russia forever defined by Tolstoy and World War I by Hemingway? Then there is a chance—the odds unknown—that some years hence, the popular view of Hitler will be shaped by Mailer’s novel. Hitler, the man of millennial urges who dominated the twentieth-century, reduced to a powerless stick figure—that would be exemplary ''contrapasso'', retributive justice meted out by literature, as though ''The Castle'' were a ''roman à clef'', albeit one written to redress historical rather than private grievances.

Meanwhile, for the present, does the novel-cum-''Purim-shpil'' change anything? If Mailer was correct in his letter to Jack Henry Abbot and my existence was stunted by Hitler, am I less stunted for having read ''Castle in the Forest''?

I resort to another autobiographical vignette.

Some months after my husband gave me ''Castle'' as a Purim gift, we were in a bookstore again, but not, as before, in a strip mall in Pittsburgh. This time we were in a shop near the chic Kärtnerstrasse, close to the street where I was born in Vienna. I had recently had a landmark birthday and it was my husband’s idea that we celebrate it there. After a lifetime of ambivalence about my natal city, I had hesitated. But since he had never really seen Vienna and it has the reputation of being one of the most livable cities in the world, I agreed to go.

On a table, among the new selections, was a stack of books entitled ''Das Schloss im Wald''. I picked up one of the books, thumbed through it, handed it to my husband. We exchanged sly glances. For my purposes, the timing of the German translation of ''The Castle in the Forest'' couldn’t have been more fortuitous.

A clerk was watching us. He had that wonderfully welcoming face that so many young Austrians have but I thought his expression implied more—a chance, perhaps, to discuss the new book with a couple of Americans.

The possibility of a literary chat was intriguing. Austria was late in addressing its Nazi past, but when it finally did, it undertook the work with commendable seriousness. I had just been to see the inverted blank concrete books of the Holocaust memorial on Judenplatz. It was, I thought, a solemn act of piety.

''“Nein, danke,”'' I shook my head and smiled at the young clerk. I didn’t need any help.

And I didn’t. I could forgo the chat. On the table in front of me I had everything I wanted. The desire for retribution is atavistic, unattractive, and yet undeniable. For the Austrians, concrete books, unwritten and unreadable, made a fit monument. But ''Das Schloss im Wald'', Mailer’s self-razing biography of Hitler, was fit for me.

Yes, Vienna was one of the most livable cities, as well as one of the prettiest. For the first time, I allowed myself to feel the familiar comfort of a childhood home and it was sweet, like ''hamantaschen''.

''I wish to thank Elemer Boreczky, Gloria Erlich, and Carol Holmes for their comments on this essay.''

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite journal |last=Anshen |first=David |title=The New Politics of Form in ''Harlot’s Ghost''|url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2 |issue=1 |date=2008 |pages=452-73 |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Armour |first=Peter |date=2000 |title=Dante’s Contrapasso: Contexts and Texts. |url= |location= |publisher= Italian Studies 55|pages=1-20 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Aronowicz |first=Annette |title=''Homens Mapole'': Hope in the Immediate Postwar Period|url=https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/article/241585|journal=Jewish Quarterly Review |volume=98 |issue=3 |date=2008 |pages=355-88 |access-date=June 22, 2010 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Bernstein |first=Mashey |title=In a Different Way, Norman Mailer Was a Deeply Jewish Writer |url=https://www.proquest.com/docview/194676510/533257E80CD3408CPQ/1?sourcetype=Magazines |journal=Deep South Jewish Voice |volume=18 |issue=1 |date=December 2007 |pages=100–101 |access-date=March 3, 2009 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite news |last=Cappell |first=Ezra |date=November 2007 |title=Norman Mailer: A Man of Letters Inspired by the People of the Book |url=https://forward.com/news/12032/norman-mailer-a-man-of-letters-inspired-by-the-pe-00800/ |work=A1 |location=ProQuest |access-date=March 3, 2009 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Coetzee |first=J. M. |date=February 15, 2007 |title=Portrait of the Monster as a Young Artist |url= |magazine=New York Review of Books ||volume=54 |issue=2 |pages=8–11 |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Alighieri |first=Dante |date=2000 |title=Inferno |translator=Robert and Jean Hollander |location=New York |publisher=Doubleday |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Fleming |first=James R |title='But Where is the Castle?': The Function of Modernist Allegory in Norman
Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest'' |url=https://cdn.wildapricot.com/209073/resources/impost/volumes/EAPSU%20Online%20-%20Volume%20Five.pdf?version=1465494662000&Policy=eyJTdGF0ZW1lbnQiOiBbeyJSZXNvdXJjZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vY2RuLndpbGRhcHJpY290LmNvbS8yMDkwNzMvcmVzb3VyY2VzL2ltcG9zdC92b2x1bWVzL0VBUFNVJTIwT25saW5lJTIwLSUyMFZvbHVtZSUyMEZpdmUucGRmP3ZlcnNpb249MTQ2NTQ5NDY2MjAwMCIsIkNvbmRpdGlvbiI6eyJEYXRlTGVzc1RoYW4iOnsiQVdTOkVwb2NoVGltZSI6MTc0MzQ2ODc3NX0sIklwQWRkcmVzcyI6eyJBV1M6U291cmNlSXAiOiIwLjAuMC4wLzAifX19XX0_&Signature=CzNUJE~LVXu1ScnPUaKX8js3Pw74M8XKUIhIwjPNXcTQvPeq6UASgLR3xhri3Zo5OPJt439qiY9ieBNTwsTOScvbVO9hl0YYebHZkCqn0eMmuFpqVifJn20eXUDfphI8PIeUCA4kMe6LYogWH4OJuKTRp9Efdas1ppdinvl0vtTXEp6B8oszT4Wx2xPSOAco9YmyyHQL5K6oPAIboQBEYMDOAR1J0Ag0zOIRQkevsAtBBKDdvYlBlprxzJDwV0iGW5Mas-Vzn8Eprss-nFvsMyK0A0st7P0mWnBx0LJvOD4xUygRl2bl7Mp0-WqDkzQ9ubaQP53bSRnIdAmxkZrIOA__&Key-Pair-Id=K27MGQSHTHAGGF |journal=EAPSU Online |volume=5 |issue= |date=Fall 2008 |pages=143–55 |access-date=July 11, 2010 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Gross |first=John |date=2007 |title="Young Adolf." Rev. of ''The Castle in the Forest.'' |url=https://www.commentary.org/articles/john-gross/the-castle-in-the-forest-by-norman-mailer/ |magazine=Commentary |volume=123 |issue=3 |location=Expanded Academic ASAP |pages=59+ |access-date=April 23, 2010 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Hartman |first=Geoffrey |title=Milton’s Counterplot |url= |journal=ELH |volume=28 |issue=1 |date=1958 |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url=https://dante.princeton.edu/pdp/ |title=PrincetonDanteProject |last1=Hollander |last2=Robert |last2=et. al. |date=February 25, 2010 |website= |publisher= |access-date= |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Kirshenblatt-Gimblett |first=Barbara |title=Contraband: Performance, Text and Analysis of a ''Purim-shpil'' |url=https://doi.org/10.2307/1145305 |journal=Drama Review |volume=24 |issue=3 |date=1980 |pages=5–16 |access-date=January 17, 2009 ||via= JSTOR |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lukacs |first=John |date=2010 |title=The Legacy of the Second World War |url= |location=New Haven |publisher=Yale University Press |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |url= |location=New York |publisher=Putnam |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1991 |title=Harlot’s Ghost |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url=https://www.bookreporter.com/authors/au-mailer-norman.asp |title=Interview by Michael Lennon |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=February 23, 2007 |website=Bookreporter.com |publisher= |access-date=March 3, 2009 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |title=Norman Mailer: Letters to Jack Abbott |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/03/12/norman-mailer-letters-to-jack-abbott/ |journal=New York Review of Books |volume=56 |issue=4 |date=March 12, 2009 |pages=n. pag. |access-date=August 7, 2010 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Milton |first=John |editor-last1=Hughes |editor-first1=Merritt |date=1957 |title=Paradise Lost. Complete Poems and Major Prose |url= |location=New York |publisher=Odyssey Press |pages=173–469 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite encyclopedia |last= |first= |date=2007 |title=Purim-Shpil |url= |encyclopedia=Encyclopaedia Judaica |location= |publisher= |edition= 2nd |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Ricks |first=Christopher |title=The Devil Only Knows |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |date=2007 |pages=206–214 |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite news |last=Siegel |first=Lee |date=21 January 2007 |title="Maestro of the Human Ego." Rev. of ''The Castle in the Forest'', by Norman Mailer |url= |work= |location= |publisher=New York Times |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Solomon |first=Barbara Probst |title=Mailer’s Choice |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |date=2007 |pages=223–28 |access-date= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in The Castle in the Forest

2025-03-30T23:24:28Z

Maggiemrogers: removed work that was intended for sandbox page, and will add back once finalized.

User:Maggiemrogers/sandbox

2025-03-30T23:23:54Z

Maggiemrogers: editing the body and works cited

This autobiographical vignette serves a purpose: there was uncanny pre- science in linking Purim to ''Castle in the Forest''. The holiday celebrates the salvation of the Persian Jews in the Fifth Century BCE from a plot by Haman, the king’s evil advisor, to have the entire community slaughtered. The Book of Esther tells how, with the help of her kinsman Mordechai, she uses her wits and her beauty to foil Haman’s plans. By the king’s decree, victors and victims undergo a swift reversal of fortune. Haman’s plot recoils back on him and he ends up on the very same gallows he had prepared for Mordechai. Meanwhile, the Jews of the realm, permitted to arm themselves, attack and kill Haman’s followers. For the Jews, sorrow is turned to joy and a day of mourning to a festival.

The only boisterous holiday in the Hebrew calendar, Purim is not unlike Carnival in using masks and costumes and giving license to rowdy behavior. That the history of the Jews is replete with other plots against them that do not end so well does not diminish the festivity of Purim; perhaps it only increases it. Through the feasting and merrymaking, the retribution against Haman is reenacted as mockery. Most Americans in urban areas are probably familiar with the special Purim pastries, poppy seed or fruit-filled triangular tarts called ''hamantaschen'', Haman’s pockets, made popular by Eastern European Jewish immigrants. In the synagogue, the holiday is celebrated by a public reading of the Scroll (Megillah) of Esther, during which the congregation deploys noisemakers (called ''greggers'' in Yiddish) to drown out the name of Haman whenever it is said aloud in the reading of the text. As the Hebrew curse has it, Haman’s name is blotted out —
except to denote pastry. Among Ashkenazi Jews, the festivities traditionally included a ''Purim-shpil'', a folk play based on the Purim story or contemporary subjects.{{efn|For a study of the reception of a Purim-shpil performed in the aftermath of World War II, see Aronowicz. For a general discussion of the Yiddish folk dramas performed at Purim, see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and “''Purim-Shpil'',” ''Encyclopaedia Judaica''.}} Crossing genre borders, I now propose to read ''Castle'' as a type of Purim entertainment, a ''shpil'' in long prose narrative form that carries the heavy burden of invoking not a catastrophe averted but a catastrophe perpetrated.

First, a disclaimer is in order. ''Castle'' can be read in the context of the retributive charivari of Purim without exaggerating the novel’s Jewish dimensions or Mailer’s engagement with Judaism.{{efn|For various and valuable insights into Mailer’s role as a Jewish writer, see Bernstein, Cappell, and Siegel.}} In fact, it is instructive to consider ''Castle'' in the light of a very different tradition, what one might call the ''locus classicus'' of retributive justice in Western literature, Canto 28 of Dante’s ''Inferno''. There the pilgrim-poet encounters Bertran de Born who, having severed filial ties between a father and son, is condemned to carry his own severed head. Holding the head by the hair and swinging it like a lantern, Bertran offers a gloss on his gruesome condition: "''Così s’osserva in me lo contrapasso''" (In me you may observe fit punishment). {{efn|Dante, ''Inferno'', 142. For explication and sources, see the commentary to 28. 142 in Hollander, ''Princeton Dante Project''.}} While scholars disagree on the extent to which the penal code of hell is based the principle of ''contrapasso'', it clearly underlies the punishment of Ugolino and Ruggieri in Canto 33.{{efn|For a comprehensive summary of the issues involved in determining whether all the condemned souls receive condign punishment, see Armour.}} Recounting how in life he and his sons were imprisoned by Ruggieri and left to starve, Ugolino implies that hunger drove him to cannibalize his children. So now in hell he is condemned to gnaw forever on the head of Ruggieri; the punishment is superbly efficient, at once echoing the crime and exacting vengeance for it. Dante’s ''contrapasso'', his vision of the precise and punctilious infernal justice of retribution, informs the ''Purim-shpil'' extravagance of ''Castle''. Mailer’s close examination of Hitler’s life—the bibliography appended to the novel is extensive—puts mockery in the service of strict accounting, the measure for measure of condign punishment.

For fifty years he had been waiting to write about Hitler, Mailer said in an interview (Lennon 2007). During that time, as the Third Reich has been examined and reexamined and incorporated into popular culture, Hitler has become, for the general population, more a figure of speech than a historical reality. The psychic havoc (Mailer’s term in ''Advertisements for Myself'' ) caused by the Second World War has morphed into cliché with the concomitant psychic pall, and the condition extends well beyond the Jewish community. So as the historical Hitler dominated most of Europe and caused the deaths of millions, the figurative Hitler still has the power to thwart discourse—mention his name and it kills the conversation.{{efn|For a concise exposition of still unanswered questions about Hitler’s regime, see Lukacs, especially 86–108.}} And in the bleak confusion and bold incompetence of American political life at the beginning of the twenty-first century, that name was invoked with alarming frequency (deployed, curiously enough, by both ends of the political spectrum).

Taking on the trope of Hitler, the aging Mailer returns to the prophetic mode of his younger self, who believed his vocation lay in becoming “''consecutively more disruptive, more dangerous, and more powerful''" (''Advertisements for Myself'' 22). He remains a disruptive writer, making his readers uncomfortable. But ever the great experimentalist of the narrative voice, he chooses now to speak with the mellow cadences of folktale, telling how ''das Waldschloss'', the castle in the forest, came to be where there was neither castle nor forest, but only the adamantine irony of inmates from Berlin imprisoned in a concentration camp where there had once been a potato field. We do not learn about this ''Waldschloss'' until the end of the novel, when we have already passed through the other adamantine irony of a tale told to avenge crimes committed more than sixty years before. The long delay has its advantage. As we know from an old adage invoked in Mailer’s ''Harlot’s Ghost'': “OSS working undercover in Italy, 1943, did encounter the following piece of Sicilian wisdom: ‘Revenge is a dish that people of taste eat cold.’” (''HG'' 813). The time is ripe for low temperature retribution.

Mailer’s instrument of revenge is the novel’s first person narrator, the gregarious, ingratiating, and ambitious devil, incarnated as Dieter the S.S. Officer (renamed D.T. during his residence in America—but of that sojourn we are told very little), who played a leading role in fostering, encouraging, and fashioning Hitler. While his boss, the Evil One, or Maestro, has turned his attention to modern technology, Dieter takes the opportunity to avenge a demotion by betraying the covert demonic organization that employed him and reveal how a boy born to an obscure Austrian peasant family became his most famous client. Barbara Probst Solomon has noted that, deliberately or not, in ''The Castle in the Forest'' Mailer “has turned the tables on Hitler. Hitler’s demonic portrait of the Jews, his obsession with their bloodlines, their presumed inherited characteristics, had to be ingested from sources close to him. And Mailer hunts down Adi’s family with the same obsessiveness and belief in inherited characteristics that Hitler did to the Jews” (225). Going far beyond subjecting the Hitler family to intense scrutiny, Mailer has contrived to give them an antagonistic writer of an unauthorized biography, a Kitty Kelley gone wild, or—the temptation to say this is irresistible—the biographer from hell. And so Dieter is.

Even earnest biographers run the risk of appropriating the lives of their subjects. For Dieter appropriation is the goal, as we learn from his teasing discussion of the narrative’s genre: “It is more than a memoir and certainly has to be most curious as a biography since it is as privileged as a novel ” (79). He may argue against the common belief that demonic possession is total but he can also boast of his mastery of the subject: “I live with the confidence that I am in a position to understand Adolf. For the fact is that I know him. I must repeat. I know him top to bottom” (9). On the basis of his successful cultivation of Hitler as a client of the Maestro, Dieter rose through the ranks of the infernal hierarchy, and in telling the story afterwards, the demoted (can we call him fallen?) devil is not about to give up his rights to the life of a celebrity. Hitler is still Dieter’s intellectual property, one might say, but the vengeance is only incidentally his. Primarily it is ours.

Dieter’s knowledge of his client is indeed extensive. He generously offers readers copious data accessible only to devils (and novelists) about Hitler’s incestuous genealogy, odious conception, and bullied and bullying childhood. He takes pains to describe the workings of infernal plots and ploys to intervene in human life. Yet nothing about the information he imparts tells us why Hitler turned out as he did—why a dysfunctional family, nasty sibling rivalry, and a failed beekeeping venture, unpleasant as they are, should lead to dictatorship, world war, and genocide. For not providing an explanation for Hitler’s evil, Mailer was criticized by some reviewers (Gross, for example). They missed the point, I believe. Such criticism presupposes that ''Castle'' should have offered the kind of catharsis-through-information that one finds in murder mysteries. Yet if we knew what caused Hitler to do what he did, would his deeds suddenly become less horrific?{{efn|For an interesting perspective on the impossibility of establishing causal relations in ''Castle'' and elsewhere, see Fleming.}} It is worth noting that even in ''The Executioner’s Song'', where Mailer is dealing with a mundane criminal, there is also no catharsis-through-information. We wait for Gary Gilmore to explain his motive, to say why he murdered the two men he robbed. But he never does.

As though anticipating the objections of his critics, Mailer has Dieter tease us with details whose later historical echo is unmistakable. Relating how Alois Hitler’s beekeeping mentor, der Alte, set fire to one of his hives, Dieter casually mentions that the young Adi happened to be present but takes care to describe the boy’s sadistic excitement: “His toes tingled, his heart shook in its chamber, he did not know whether to scream or to roar with laughter” (263). Since der Alte burns the hive in obedience to instructions sent to him in a dream by the very same Dieter and the boy likewise has been instructed by dream to be at the old man’s farm, can we conclude that this is a formative moment? The devil demurs with a shrug. He had just come back from creating mayhem in Russia, he tells us, and he was not up to the task of dealing with the mind of this particular six-year old (the six-year old who interests us more than the entire Russian royal family). If we were expecting to derive some intellectual or emotional satisfaction from that proffered datum about the young Hitler’s fascination with fiery death and mass slaughter, we are disappointed. Dieter denies us the pleasure.

A balder instance is the large ''Hakenkreuz'' carved into the gate of the monastery school the young Adi attends. At this point the swastika is not yet an abhorrent political symbol; it is merely the coat of arms of an Abbot von Hagen who may have enjoyed the punning allusion to his name. The gate is the scene of an episode in which the nine-year-old Hitler, caught smoking by one of his teachers who happens to be an important client of the infernal powers, has a chance to hone his skills in manipulation and gives up the idea of becoming a priest. Yet as soon as Dieter brings the tantalizing description of the school archway to our attention, he warns us against rushing to conclusions: “Not too much, I hasten to add, should be made of this. Von Hagen’s swastika was subtly carved, and so offered no striking suggestion of the phalanxes yet to march beneath that symbol. Nonetheless, there it was, a crooked cross” (341-42). The carving is and is not significant; it does and does not foreshadow the goose-stepping hordes.

Although Dieter has a pronounced impish edge, he does not dangle provocative details before his readers merely to amuse himself at their expense. Ambiguity comes with the secret agent’s territory. The nature of his work requires him to move from one blind stratagem to another, rely on sources of varying credibility, and grasp the opportunities that come with occasional bits of good luck. The outcome is always unpredictable and always obscure; cause and effect are blurred.

The infernal organization to which Dieter belongs is, after all, a literary descendant of the CIA in ''Harlot’s Ghost'', and it is instructive to remember Harry Hubbard’s limited knowledge about the Company (as the agents call their organization) and its manifold machinations against its ostensible enemy, the KGB. Applying the same kind of intellectual limitations to his private life, Hubbard remains unaware of the state of his own floundering marriage. Wandering for decades in a maze of disguises, disinformation, cryptonyms, letters, messages, and fragments of poetry, he finally tries to extricate himself by writing a memoir in two disjointed manuscripts, Alpha and Omega (the other twenty-two letters of the Greek alphabet coming between them, it is unlikely the two parts will ever fit together). Hubbard’s hapless ignorance is institution-wide. Hugh Montague may be the master of literary cryptograms, but his monologue after the Kennedy assassination reveals (in a moment of black humor) his true ignorance as he tries to cover his tracks without knowing precisely where his tracks are. His desperate self-vindication is worthy of one of Robert Browning’s soliloquizing madmen. Always more vulnerable than his superior, Harry even worries that through the convoluted webs of intrigue he has set in motion, he himself might ultimately be culpable.{{efn|For the “radical indeterminacy” of ''Harlot’s Ghost'', see Anshen, 457.}}

A supernatural veneer is, evidently, no protection against the ethos of ignorance inherent in covert agencies. Dieter is better informed than Harry only in that, Socratically, he knows how little he knows, admitting (while still status conscious): “I am about as much endowed beyond an accomplished scholar as he in turn is more knowledgeable than a clod from a poorly endowed school” (236). To the agent who must traverse the murky terrain of the human mind, that academic advantage counts for very little. And, again, like his human counterpart, Dieter is deliberately kept ignorant by his employer: “In truth, I do not know much about hell. I am not even certain it exists. The Maestro has kept us, after all, in enclaves. We are not supposed to know what we do not need to know” (385). Dieter must entertain the possibility that the Maestro is not even the Devil himself, but merely another one of the many infernal bureaucrats. Compartmentalization keeps the agents wandering in the labyrinth of their assigned enclaves.

Dieter is, then, no better than a CIA agent at charting his own success or foreseeing the future course of history (and perhaps the Maestro and his archenemy, the Dummkopf, are also limited in this respect). After the young Adi helps his father gas a hive of sick bees, the boy is sent a dream etching in which he is given an assignment to count the dead insects. Laying them out in rows, he takes pride in counting four thousand dead before the dream is interrupted. But again Dieter adds a caveat against hasty conclusions and reiterates the uncertainty of the outcome:
<blockquote>Here, I would warn the reader not to make too much of the gassing nor the body count. It is not to be understood as the unique cause of all that came later. For a dream-etching... leaves but a dot upon your psyche, a footprint to anticipate a future sequence of development that may or may not come to pass in future decades. Most dream-etchings are not unlike the abandoned foundations one can see on the outskirts of Third World cities. Left to molder for lack of further funds, they lie there, excavations on a scraggly field. (201)</blockquote>
As spies plant information and pay informants, so devils etch dreams, but not all of their schemes come to fruition.

Christopher Ricks has noted that in the descriptions of Alois Hitler’s attempts to become a beekeeper “there are glimpses of something that might have been other, a world of which one would not have had to despair” (208). The beehives are a vision not only of a naturally thriving world but of a communal life otherwise unavailable to the Hitler family. Beyond Alois’s visits to the local tavern and, later, an occasional ''Bürgerabend'', there is only hearth and home, subject to frequent changes of address. One might be able to consider the beekeeping episodes as a kind of counterplot (as Geoffrey Hartman called that sense of an omnipresent divine providence protecting creation in ''Paradise Lost'', especially those redemptive images embedded in the pastoral similes in Books I and II) if, in the shadow of the Waldschloss, one could imagine good coming out of evil. But no, there is neither divine providence nor protection in this castle in this forest, even within the confines of a figure of speech.

If there is a counterplot in ''Castle'', it tends toward retribution, not redemption. By modeling the structure of the Maestro’s infernal organization on the CIA of ''Harlot’s Ghost'', Mailer has assured that Hitler will be denied centrality in his own life story. He will be groomed, honed, tricked out for whatever task his handler deems necessary; he will be scrupulously manipulated; but personally he will matter not at all. It is consistent with the nature of Dieter’s work that he should resist calling any episode in little Adi’s life formative. Intelligence work is like that—uncertain and inconclusive. Dieter’s caveats may give us, painfully, a glimpse of another world, one in which his schemes failed, but in our world, where they succeeded, the absence of formative experiences works towards the progressive diminution of Hitler. Very simply, if fashioning the Führer required hard demonic labor, then we can smile sarcastically along with Dieter as he listens to Himmler expound on Hitler’s superhuman Will and Vision and the rest of the pseudo- political, pseudo-philosophical notions dear to Nazi hearts. Superhuman Will and Vision? Dieter must think the mortals fools. Does Himmler have any idea how many demon-hours (evidently the infernal clocks are not set by eternity) were required to make all those dream etchings (and some of them went nowhere) in Hitler’s brain?

In that light, the coronation of Czar Nicholas II in Book VIII becomes a necessary detour away from rural Austria rather than a digression from Hitler’s biography. In St. Petersburg and at Khodynskoe, the Maestro’s agents are preparing the way for the Bolshevik Revolution and ultimately Stalin, and one need not indulge in alternative history to see how Hitler’s career depends on their success. The eastern assignment is evidently so important to the demonic designs that it boosts Dieter’s career: “I can vouch that the eight months I lived in Russia from late 1895 to the early summer of 1896 became a prominent element in my development as a high devil” (213). But—more diminution—as the reader well knows, Dieter’s Russian strategy also leads to the entry of the Red Army into Berlin and Hitler’s suicide and fiery end.

The diminution of Hitler does not depend solely on future events. In his capacity as biographer from hell, Dieter works against his subject from the beginning, cutting Hitler down to size even as he narrates his life story. Narcissistic and reflexively competitive, Dieter does not gladly share the spotlight with his young charge and his contempt is palpable. (We already know from ''Harlot’s Ghost'' that it is de rigueur for intelligence agents to despise the clients they cultivate). “I, too, am a protagonist” (''CIF'' 213), Dieter is quick to remind us. He presents his client as a boy devoid of any admirable qualities, except a talent for war games, the skill that damns him by bringing him to the attention of the Evil One. Otherwise Adi is an unappealing, fearful egotist enamored of power and brute force. Moreover, he suffers from that traditional affliction of the Evil One’s clients, a sulphurous smell. Every so often, Dieter reminds us that the little boy stinks; it is a gratuitous detail, mean and petty, but also funny. Adi is eventually shown to be completely loathsome in his jealousy (possibly murderous—Dieter hedges his bet here) towards his younger brother, the angelic Edmund whose death almost brings a smattering of human emotion to the demon. Compared with Adi, even Alois Senior and Junior, despite their crude appetites, cruelty, and violence, seem recognizably human.

If he demurs on the formative experiences in Adi’s life, Dieter is considerably less reluctant to disclose the requisite personality traits he nurtures in him. He begins by feeding the boy’s vanity, feeding it so well that every incident in his harsh, claustrophobic life is measured by an increase or decrease in his quantity of self-esteem. A stepbrother runs away from home, a brother dies, and Adi is chiefly concerned with his place in the family hierarchy, delighting when he becomes, first, the eldest son, then the only son. Through dreams, Dieter ensures that his young charge believes he has a special destiny, a belief completely contradicted by daytime evidence. The woozy nationalism of the late nineteenth century is seductive and, before long, the boy links his desperate and defiant sense of personal destiny to that of the ''Volk''. Following an adolescent outburst against both the prevailing prudery and his own sexual disgust, the young Hitler reads Treitschke in a school text and becomes mesmerized by a hyperbolic passage about the mystery and majesty of the German people. He barely understands the words but he is certain they are true. At this juncture, Dieter points menacingly toward the future: “We devils have known for a long time that a mediocre mind, once devoted to one mystical idea, can obtain a mental confidence well beyond its normal potential” (447). This is a contemptuous assessment from a biographer who thoroughly knows his subject—and a depressing thought, but true.

To complement his self-induced grandiosity, the young Hitler is schooled by Dieter in the fine art of data selection. When he receives failing grades at the Realschule, the boy convinces himself—with help from his handler—that his failure is actually a sign of intellectual superiority. In a compensatory fantasy, he envisions himself as a schoolteacher giving a lecture on the secret of true learning: “Do not try to remember all the facts of every historical event.... Most of the facts you have memorized are no better than debris which contradict other facts. So you will be in a state of confusion.... Select only those facts which clarify the issues” (419). This skill will obviously prove useful in Hitler’s later career. It is, incidentally, worth noting that here Mailer has slyly summarized a basic tool of bad governance, popular with a great many leaders besides Hitler. (One would very much like to know where D.T., the American incarnation of the narrating devil who was once Dieter, would have directed his attention on this side of the Atlantic. But those episodes belong to a subsequent volume that Mailer did not live to write.)

By the time of the ''Realschule'' failures, Dieter has already used Adi’s twin obsessions with primogeniture and patriarchy to prepare him for the apotheosis of data selection—a lifetime of mendacity. (Curiously enough, although he was once reviled by feminists, in ''The Castle in the Forest'' Mailer offers a stunningly cold dissection of patriarchy and its discontents.) When Alois Senior savagely attacks his eldest son, Dieter deploys his infernal machinations to make the terrified little Adi believe that he himself was the victim, and Hitler spends the rest of his life believing that his father almost beat him to death. Through the false memory, Dieter lays the groundwork for an entire edifice of lies: “this fiction would enable me to develop Adi’s future incapacity to tell the truth. By the time his political career began, he was in command of an artwork of lies elaborate enough to support his smallest need. He could shave the truth by a hair or subvert it altogether” (316). If it were any man but Hitler, the pathos of a bogus Oedipal struggle (a hated stepbrother acting as surrogate to confront the vengeful father where three roads meet) would merit pity.

Or, there would be pity, if the narrator were someone other than Dieter. Although he is an immensely entertaining story-teller, he ''is'' a devil, cut off from the full range of human experience, his emotional vocabulary accurate only when expressing combative, competitive egotism. It is useful here to remember how one of Dieter’s literary ancestors, Milton’s Satan, becomes so distracted by Eve’s beauty that for a moment he loses his hate and envy and stands there, abstracted from his usual evil, “Stupidly good” (''Paradise Lost'' 9. 465). Dumb passivity is as close as Satan gets to understanding Eden and prelapsarian experience; the local animals and even the plants have richer emotional lives than he does. For his part, Dieter is well-acquainted with envy, self-pity, ambition, lust, physical pain and pleasure. But compassion, longing, sorrow, remorse and love are unfamiliar to him, except in a reductive sense: “we do look for the lowest common denominator to any truth” (Mailer, Castle 99).

Dieter’s truncated psyche gets him (that is, his S.S. officer incarnation) killed in the Waldschloss. As he tells it, the Jewish psychiatrist who interrogates him is upset by the pestilential effluvia and the shouts of the liberated prisoners and seeks out Dieter’s company because they are both high-ranking officers. Dieter must have engaged in some extremely obtuse data selection because he has egregiously misjudged the situation. The American has just encountered immeasurably greater horrors than a few bad smells and as a Jew is probably taking the horrors personally. But empathy is so alien to Dieter that he makes the fatal mistake of pretending to be conscience-stricken. (An argument could be made that Dieter is clueless here because he has been wearing the S.S. uniform for so long that even the vestigial sensibilities of a demon have atrophied.) The sense that Dieter gets what he deserves is inescapable.

At that moment, we are abruptly reminded that Dieter is not an impartial narrator nor a reliable one, and we have been of (and at) the devil’s party, amusing ourselves as we watch the heartless education of a wretched little boy in the arts of lying and self-deception. In 1940, in ''The Great Dictator'', Charlie Chaplin imagined Hitler subsumed by a double, an anonymous Jewish barber. What Chaplin began before Hitler was fully yet the murderer he would become, Mailer completes after the fact. Hitler is subsumed by his biographer, the slick Dieter, good at schmoozing and imprinting his own image on his clients. Significantly, Dieter appropriates the soul of the young Hitler without temptation, without the flattery and bogus promises of wealth, power, knowledge, or beautiful women that are the stock-in-trade ploy of the devil. It is possible a temptation scene might have figured in a later episode in a subsequent volume, but that is idle speculation. In the novel as we have it, Dieter so overshadows his client that he effectively blots him out.

As we know from Aristotle, history merely tells us what happened, poetry what might have happened. There is reason to believe (or hope) that if what might have happened is well told enough, the way we perceive what happened changes. Isn’t Napoleon’s invasion of Russia forever defined by Tolstoy and World War I by Hemingway? Then there is a chance—the odds unknown—that some years hence, the popular view of Hitler will be shaped by Mailer’s novel. Hitler, the man of millennial urges who dominated the twentieth-century, reduced to a powerless stick figure—that would be exemplary ''contrapasso'', retributive justice meted out by literature, as though ''The Castle'' were a ''roman à clef'', albeit one written to redress historical rather than private grievances.

Meanwhile, for the present, does the novel-cum-''Purim-shpil'' change anything? If Mailer was correct in his letter to Jack Henry Abbot and my existence was stunted by Hitler, am I less stunted for having read ''Castle in the Forest''?

I resort to another autobiographical vignette.

Some months after my husband gave me ''Castle'' as a Purim gift, we were in a bookstore again, but not, as before, in a strip mall in Pittsburgh. This time we were in a shop near the chic Kärtnerstrasse, close to the street where I was born in Vienna. I had recently had a landmark birthday and it was my husband’s idea that we celebrate it there. After a lifetime of ambivalence about my natal city, I had hesitated. But since he had never really seen Vienna and it has the reputation of being one of the most livable cities in the world, I agreed to go.

On a table, among the new selections, was a stack of books entitled ''Das Schloss im Wald''. I picked up one of the books, thumbed through it, handed it to my husband. We exchanged sly glances. For my purposes, the timing of the German translation of ''The Castle in the Forest'' couldn’t have been more fortuitous.

A clerk was watching us. He had that wonderfully welcoming face that so many young Austrians have but I thought his expression implied more—a chance, perhaps, to discuss the new book with a couple of Americans.

The possibility of a literary chat was intriguing. Austria was late in addressing its Nazi past, but when it finally did, it undertook the work with commendable seriousness. I had just been to see the inverted blank concrete books of the Holocaust memorial on Judenplatz. It was, I thought, a solemn act of piety.

''“Nein, danke,”'' I shook my head and smiled at the young clerk. I didn’t need any help.

And I didn’t. I could forgo the chat. On the table in front of me I had everything I wanted. The desire for retribution is atavistic, unattractive, and yet undeniable. For the Austrians, concrete books, unwritten and unreadable, made a fit monument. But ''Das Schloss im Wald'', Mailer’s self-razing biography of Hitler, was fit for me.

Yes, Vienna was one of the most livable cities, as well as one of the prettiest. For the first time, I allowed myself to feel the familiar comfort of a childhood home and it was sweet, like ''hamantaschen''.

''I wish to thank Elemer Boreczky, Gloria Erlich, and Carol Holmes for their comments on this essay.''

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite journal |last=Anshen |first=David |title=The New Politics of Form in ''Harlot’s Ghost''|url= |journal= |volume=2 |issue=1 |date=2008 |pages=452-73 |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Armour |first=Peter |date=2000 |title=Dante’s Contrapasso: Contexts and Texts. |url= |location= |publisher= Italian Studies 55|pages=1-20 |ref=harv }}

Aronowicz, Annette. “''Homens Mapole'': Hope in the Immediate Postwar Period.” ''Jewish Quarterly
Review'' 98. 3 (2008): 355–88. ''Project Muse''. Web. 22 June 2010.

Bernstein, Mashey. “In a Different Way, Norman Mailer Was a Deeply Jewish Writer.” ''Deep South Jewish Voice'' 18. 1 (Dec. 2007): 100–101. ''ProQuest''. Web. 3 Mar. 2009.

Cappell, Ezra. “Norman Mailer: A Man of Letters Inspired by the People of the Book.” ''Forward''. 16
Nov. 2007: A1. ''ProQuest''. Web. 3 Mar. 2009.

Coetzee, J. M. "Portrait of the Monster as a Young Artist." ''New York Review of Books'' 54. 2 (15 Feb.
2007): 8–11. Print.

Dante Alighieri. ''Inferno''. Trans. Robert and Jean Hollander. New York: Doubleday, 2000. Print.

Fleming, James R. "‘But Where is the Castle?’: The Function of Modernist Allegory in Norman
Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest''." ''EAPSU Online'' 5 (Fall, 2008): 143–55. Web. 11 July 2010.

Gross, John."Young Adolf." Rev. of ''The Castle in the Forest''. ''Commentary'' 123. 3 (2007): 59+. ''Expanded
Academic ASAP''. Web. 23 Apr. 2010.

Hartman, Geoffrey. “Milton’s Counterplot.“ ''ELH'' 28. 1 (1958): 1–12. Print.

Hollander,Robertet.al. ''PrincetonDanteProject''.Web. 25 Feb. 2010. <http://etcweb.princeton.edu/dante/pdp/>.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. “Contraband: Performance, Text and Analysis of a ''Purim-shpil''.” ''Drama Review'' 24. 3 (1980): 5–16. ''JSTOR''. Web. 17 Jan. 2009.

Lukacs, John. ''The Legacy of the Second World War''. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Print.

Mailer, Norman. ''Advertisements for Myself''. New York. Putnam. 1959. Print.

____. ''The Castle in the Forest''. New York: Random House, 2007. Print

____. ''Harlot’s Ghost''. New York: Random House, 1991. Print.

____. Interview by Michael Lennon. ''Bookreporter.com''. 23 Feb. 2007. Web. 3 Mar. 2009. <http://
www.bookreporter.com/authors/au-mailer-norman.asp>.

____. “Norman Mailer: Letters to Jack Abbott.” ''New York Review of Books'' 56. 4 (12 March 1009): n. pag. Web. 7 Aug. 2010.

Milton, John. ''Paradise Lost. Complete Poems and Major Prose.'' Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York:
Odyssey Press, 1957. 173–469. Print.

''“Purim-Shpil.” Encyclopaedia Judaica''. 2nd ed. 2007. Print.

Ricks, Christopher. “The Devil Only Knows.” ''The Mailer Review'' 1. 1 (2007): 206–214. Print.

Siegel, Lee. “Maestro of the Human Ego.“ Rev. of ''The Castle in the Forest'', by Norman Mailer. ''New
York Times''. New York Times. 21 Jan. 2007. Web. 22 Apr. 2010.

Solomon, Barbara Probst. “Mailer’s Choice.” ''The Mailer Review'' 1. 1 (2007): 223–28. Print.

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in The Castle in the Forest

2025-03-30T22:03:14Z

Maggiemrogers: Addition of the rest of the body, and working on the sources and footnotes.

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{{Byline|last=Peczenik|first=Fannie|abstract=A close reading of the importance of place in Mailer’s last novel.}}
<blockquote>You don’t know what it is to have six million of your people killed when there are only twelve million of them on earth. You don’t know the profound and fundamental stunting of existence that got into the blood cells of every Jew after Hitler had done his work. (Norman Mailer to Jack Abbott, 18 April 1979)</blockquote>
When I heard that Mailer had written a fictional biography of Hitler, I made up my mind not to read it. The idea was offensive. At this late date, the life of Adolf Hitler did not merit another examination, least of all in a novel, which would entail an imaginative engagement with the Führer’s private fears, desires, hopes, and dreams. Who wanted to spend time in close communion with that repellent psyche? Not I. Born in post-war Vienna to parents who were Holocaust survivors from Poland, I could say that I had already shared far too much of my life with Hitler.

Distaste is one thing, curiosity another. And I was just curious enough about ''Castle in the Forest'' to read J. M. Coetzee’s essay in the ''New York Review''. A review seemed like a good compromise: appraisal and analysis instead of direct contact. But as it turned out, Coetzee made such a strong argument for the seriousness of the enterprise that I reconsidered my opinion. The novel might have some merit after all. Yet I was in no hurry to read it. Months passed, and then one early spring day, as my husband and I were strolling through a bookstore, he picked a copy of ''Castle in the Forest'' off a shelf. “Here,” he said, “I’ll get this for you. It’s a Purim gift.”

This autobiographical vignette serves a purpose: there was uncanny pre- science in linking Purim to ''Castle in the Forest''. The holiday celebrates the salvation of the Persian Jews in the Fifth Century BCE from a plot by Haman, the king’s evil advisor, to have the entire community slaughtered. The Book of Esther tells how, with the help of her kinsman Mordechai, she uses her wits and her beauty to foil Haman’s plans. By the king’s decree, victors and victims undergo a swift reversal of fortune. Haman’s plot recoils back on him and he ends up on the very same gallows he had prepared for Mordechai. Meanwhile, the Jews of the realm, permitted to arm themselves, attack and kill Haman’s followers. For the Jews, sorrow is turned to joy and a day of mourning to a festival.

The only boisterous holiday in the Hebrew calendar, Purim is not unlike Carnival in using masks and costumes and giving license to rowdy behavior. That the history of the Jews is replete with other plots against them that do not end so well does not diminish the festivity of Purim; perhaps it only increases it. Through the feasting and merrymaking, the retribution against Haman is reenacted as mockery. Most Americans in urban areas are probably familiar with the special Purim pastries, poppy seed or fruit-filled triangular tarts called ''hamantaschen'', Haman’s pockets, made popular by Eastern European Jewish immigrants. In the synagogue, the holiday is celebrated by a public reading of the Scroll (Megillah) of Esther, during which the congregation deploys noisemakers (called ''greggers'' in Yiddish) to drown out the name of Haman whenever it is said aloud in the reading of the text. As the Hebrew curse has it, Haman’s name is blotted out —
except to denote pastry. Among Ashkenazi Jews, the festivities traditionally included a ''Purim-shpil'', a folk play based on the Purim story or contemporary subjects.{{efn|For a study of the reception of a Purim-shpil performed in the aftermath of World War II, see Aronowicz. For a general discussion of the Yiddish folk dramas performed at Purim, see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and “''Purim-Shpil'',” ''Encyclopaedia Judaica''.}} Crossing genre borders, I now propose to read ''Castle'' as a type of Purim entertainment, a ''shpil'' in long prose narrative form that carries the heavy burden of invoking not a catastrophe averted but a catastrophe perpetrated.

First, a disclaimer is in order. ''Castle'' can be read in the context of the retributive charivari of Purim without exaggerating the novel’s Jewish dimensions or Mailer’s engagement with Judaism.{{efn|For various and valuable insights into Mailer’s role as a Jewish writer, see Bernstein, Cappell, and Siegel.}} In fact, it is instructive to consider ''Castle'' in the light of a very different tradition, what one might call the ''locus classicus'' of retributive justice in Western literature, Canto 28 of Dante’s ''Inferno''. There the pilgrim-poet encounters Bertran de Born who, having severed filial ties between a father and son, is condemned to carry his own severed head. Holding the head by the hair and swinging it like a lantern, Bertran offers a gloss on his gruesome condition: "''Così s’osserva in me lo contrapasso''" (In me you may observe fit punishment). {{efn|Dante, ''Inferno'', 142. For explication and sources, see the commentary to 28. 142 in Hollander, ''Princeton Dante Project''.}} While scholars disagree on the extent to which the penal code of hell is based the principle of ''contrapasso'', it clearly underlies the punishment of Ugolino and Ruggieri in Canto 33.{{efn|For a comprehensive summary of the issues involved in determining whether all the condemned souls receive condign punishment, see Armour.}} Recounting how in life he and his sons were imprisoned by Ruggieri and left to starve, Ugolino implies that hunger drove him to cannibalize his children. So now in hell he is condemned to gnaw forever on the head of Ruggieri; the punishment is superbly efficient, at once echoing the crime and exacting vengeance for it. Dante’s ''contrapasso'', his vision of the precise and punctilious infernal justice of retribution, informs the ''Purim-shpil'' extravagance of ''Castle''. Mailer’s close examination of Hitler’s life—the bibliography appended to the novel is extensive—puts mockery in the service of strict accounting, the measure for measure of condign punishment.

For fifty years he had been waiting to write about Hitler, Mailer said in an interview (Lennon 2007). During that time, as the Third Reich has been examined and reexamined and incorporated into popular culture, Hitler has become, for the general population, more a figure of speech than a historical reality. The psychic havoc (Mailer’s term in ''Advertisements for Myself'' ) caused by the Second World War has morphed into cliché with the concomitant psychic pall, and the condition extends well beyond the Jewish community. So as the historical Hitler dominated most of Europe and caused the deaths of millions, the figurative Hitler still has the power to thwart discourse—mention his name and it kills the conversation.{{efn|For a concise exposition of still unanswered questions about Hitler’s regime, see Lukacs, especially 86–108.}} And in the bleak confusion and bold incompetence of American political life at the beginning of the twenty-first century, that name was invoked with alarming frequency (deployed, curiously enough, by both ends of the political spectrum).

Taking on the trope of Hitler, the aging Mailer returns to the prophetic mode of his younger self, who believed his vocation lay in becoming “''consecutively more disruptive, more dangerous, and more powerful''" (''Advertisements for Myself'' 22). He remains a disruptive writer, making his readers uncomfortable. But ever the great experimentalist of the narrative voice, he chooses now to speak with the mellow cadences of folktale, telling how ''das Waldschloss'', the castle in the forest, came to be where there was neither castle nor forest, but only the adamantine irony of inmates from Berlin imprisoned in a concentration camp where there had once been a potato field. We do not learn about this ''Waldschloss'' until the end of the novel, when we have already passed through the other adamantine irony of a tale told to avenge crimes committed more than sixty years before. The long delay has its advantage. As we know from an old adage invoked in Mailer’s ''Harlot’s Ghost'': “OSS working undercover in Italy, 1943, did encounter the following piece of Sicilian wisdom: ‘Revenge is a dish that people of taste eat cold.’” (''HG'' 813). The time is ripe for low temperature retribution.

Mailer’s instrument of revenge is the novel’s first person narrator, the gregarious, ingratiating, and ambitious devil, incarnated as Dieter the S.S. Officer (renamed D.T. during his residence in America—but of that sojourn we are told very little), who played a leading role in fostering, encouraging, and fashioning Hitler. While his boss, the Evil One, or Maestro, has turned his attention to modern technology, Dieter takes the opportunity to avenge a demotion by betraying the covert demonic organization that employed him and reveal how a boy born to an obscure Austrian peasant family became his most famous client. Barbara Probst Solomon has noted that, deliberately or not, in ''The Castle in the Forest'' Mailer “has turned the tables on Hitler. Hitler’s demonic portrait of the Jews, his obsession with their bloodlines, their presumed inherited characteristics, had to be ingested from sources close to him. And Mailer hunts down Adi’s family with the same obsessiveness and belief in inherited characteristics that Hitler did to the Jews” (225). Going far beyond subjecting the Hitler family to intense scrutiny, Mailer has contrived to give them an antagonistic writer of an unauthorized biography, a Kitty Kelley gone wild, or—the temptation to say this is irresistible—the biographer from hell. And so Dieter is.

Even earnest biographers run the risk of appropriating the lives of their subjects. For Dieter appropriation is the goal, as we learn from his teasing discussion of the narrative’s genre: “It is more than a memoir and certainly has to be most curious as a biography since it is as privileged as a novel ” (79). He may argue against the common belief that demonic possession is total but he can also boast of his mastery of the subject: “I live with the confidence that I am in a position to understand Adolf. For the fact is that I know him. I must repeat. I know him top to bottom” (9). On the basis of his successful cultivation of Hitler as a client of the Maestro, Dieter rose through the ranks of the infernal hierarchy, and in telling the story afterwards, the demoted (can we call him fallen?) devil is not about to give up his rights to the life of a celebrity. Hitler is still Dieter’s intellectual property, one might say, but the vengeance is only incidentally his. Primarily it is ours.

Dieter’s knowledge of his client is indeed extensive. He generously offers readers copious data accessible only to devils (and novelists) about Hitler’s incestuous genealogy, odious conception, and bullied and bullying childhood. He takes pains to describe the workings of infernal plots and ploys to intervene in human life. Yet nothing about the information he imparts tells us why Hitler turned out as he did—why a dysfunctional family, nasty sibling rivalry, and a failed beekeeping venture, unpleasant as they are, should lead to dictatorship, world war, and genocide. For not providing an explanation for Hitler’s evil, Mailer was criticized by some reviewers (Gross, for example). They missed the point, I believe. Such criticism presupposes that ''Castle'' should have offered the kind of catharsis-through-information that one finds in murder mysteries. Yet if we knew what caused Hitler to do what he did, would his deeds suddenly become less horrific?{{efn|For an interesting perspective on the impossibility of establishing causal relations in ''Castle'' and elsewhere, see Fleming.}} It is worth noting that even in ''The Executioner’s Song'', where Mailer is dealing with a mundane criminal, there is also no catharsis-through-information. We wait for Gary Gilmore to explain his motive, to say why he murdered the two men he robbed. But he never does.

As though anticipating the objections of his critics, Mailer has Dieter tease us with details whose later historical echo is unmistakable. Relating how Alois Hitler’s beekeeping mentor, der Alte, set fire to one of his hives, Dieter casually mentions that the young Adi happened to be present but takes care to describe the boy’s sadistic excitement: “His toes tingled, his heart shook in its chamber, he did not know whether to scream or to roar with laughter” (263). Since der Alte burns the hive in obedience to instructions sent to him in a dream by the very same Dieter and the boy likewise has been instructed by dream to be at the old man’s farm, can we conclude that this is a formative moment? The devil demurs with a shrug. He had just come back from creating mayhem in Russia, he tells us, and he was not up to the task of dealing with the mind of this particular six-year old (the six-year old who interests us more than the entire Russian royal family). If we were expecting to derive some intellectual or emotional satisfaction from that proffered datum about the young Hitler’s fascination with fiery death and mass slaughter, we are disappointed. Dieter denies us the pleasure.

A balder instance is the large ''Hakenkreuz'' carved into the gate of the monastery school the young Adi attends. At this point the swastika is not yet an abhorrent political symbol; it is merely the coat of arms of an Abbot von Hagen who may have enjoyed the punning allusion to his name. The gate is the scene of an episode in which the nine-year-old Hitler, caught smoking by one of his teachers who happens to be an important client of the infernal powers, has a chance to hone his skills in manipulation and gives up the idea of becoming a priest. Yet as soon as Dieter brings the tantalizing description of the school archway to our attention, he warns us against rushing to conclusions: “Not too much, I hasten to add, should be made of this. Von Hagen’s swastika was subtly carved, and so offered no striking suggestion of the phalanxes yet to march beneath that symbol. Nonetheless, there it was, a crooked cross” (341-42). The carving is and is not significant; it does and does not foreshadow the goose-stepping hordes.

Although Dieter has a pronounced impish edge, he does not dangle provocative details before his readers merely to amuse himself at their expense. Ambiguity comes with the secret agent’s territory. The nature of his work requires him to move from one blind stratagem to another, rely on sources of varying credibility, and grasp the opportunities that come with occasional bits of good luck. The outcome is always unpredictable and always obscure; cause and effect are blurred.

The infernal organization to which Dieter belongs is, after all, a literary descendant of the CIA in ''Harlot’s Ghost'', and it is instructive to remember Harry Hubbard’s limited knowledge about the Company (as the agents call their organization) and its manifold machinations against its ostensible enemy, the KGB. Applying the same kind of intellectual limitations to his private life, Hubbard remains unaware of the state of his own floundering marriage. Wandering for decades in a maze of disguises, disinformation, cryptonyms, letters, messages, and fragments of poetry, he finally tries to extricate himself by writing a memoir in two disjointed manuscripts, Alpha and Omega (the other twenty-two letters of the Greek alphabet coming between them, it is unlikely the two parts will ever fit together). Hubbard’s hapless ignorance is institution-wide. Hugh Montague may be the master of literary cryptograms, but his monologue after the Kennedy assassination reveals (in a moment of black humor) his true ignorance as he tries to cover his tracks without knowing precisely where his tracks are. His desperate self-vindication is worthy of one of Robert Browning’s soliloquizing madmen. Always more vulnerable than his superior, Harry even worries that through the convoluted webs of intrigue he has set in motion, he himself might ultimately be culpable.{{efn|For the “radical indeterminacy” of ''Harlot’s Ghost'', see Anshen, 457.}}

A supernatural veneer is, evidently, no protection against the ethos of ignorance inherent in covert agencies. Dieter is better informed than Harry only in that, Socratically, he knows how little he knows, admitting (while still status conscious): “I am about as much endowed beyond an accomplished scholar as he in turn is more knowledgeable than a clod from a poorly endowed school” (236). To the agent who must traverse the murky terrain of the human mind, that academic advantage counts for very little. And, again, like his human counterpart, Dieter is deliberately kept ignorant by his employer: “In truth, I do not know much about hell. I am not even certain it exists. The Maestro has kept us, after all, in enclaves. We are not supposed to know what we do not need to know” (385). Dieter must entertain the possibility that the Maestro is not even the Devil himself, but merely another one of the many infernal bureaucrats. Compartmentalization keeps the agents wandering in the labyrinth of their assigned enclaves.

Dieter is, then, no better than a CIA agent at charting his own success or foreseeing the future course of history (and perhaps the Maestro and his archenemy, the Dummkopf, are also limited in this respect). After the young Adi helps his father gas a hive of sick bees, the boy is sent a dream etching in which he is given an assignment to count the dead insects. Laying them out in rows, he takes pride in counting four thousand dead before the dream is interrupted. But again Dieter adds a caveat against hasty conclusions and reiterates the uncertainty of the outcome:
<blockquote>Here, I would warn the reader not to make too much of the gassing nor the body count. It is not to be understood as the unique cause of all that came later. For a dream-etching... leaves but a dot upon your psyche, a footprint to anticipate a future sequence of development that may or may not come to pass in future decades. Most dream-etchings are not unlike the abandoned foundations one can see on the outskirts of Third World cities. Left to molder for lack of further funds, they lie there, excavations on a scraggly field. (201)</blockquote>
As spies plant information and pay informants, so devils etch dreams, but not all of their schemes come to fruition.

Christopher Ricks has noted that in the descriptions of Alois Hitler’s attempts to become a beekeeper “there are glimpses of something that might have been other, a world of which one would not have had to despair” (208). The beehives are a vision not only of a naturally thriving world but of a communal life otherwise unavailable to the Hitler family. Beyond Alois’s visits to the local tavern and, later, an occasional ''Bürgerabend'', there is only hearth and home, subject to frequent changes of address. One might be able to consider the beekeeping episodes as a kind of counterplot (as Geoffrey Hartman called that sense of an omnipresent divine providence protecting creation in ''Paradise Lost'', especially those redemptive images embedded in the pastoral similes in Books I and II) if, in the shadow of the Waldschloss, one could imagine good coming out of evil. But no, there is neither divine providence nor protection in this castle in this forest, even within the confines of a figure of speech.

If there is a counterplot in ''Castle'', it tends toward retribution, not redemption. By modeling the structure of the Maestro’s infernal organization on the CIA of ''Harlot’s Ghost'', Mailer has assured that Hitler will be denied centrality in his own life story. He will be groomed, honed, tricked out for whatever task his handler deems necessary; he will be scrupulously manipulated; but personally he will matter not at all. It is consistent with the nature of Dieter’s work that he should resist calling any episode in little Adi’s life formative. Intelligence work is like that—uncertain and inconclusive. Dieter’s caveats may give us, painfully, a glimpse of another world, one in which his schemes failed, but in our world, where they succeeded, the absence of formative experiences works towards the progressive diminution of Hitler. Very simply, if fashioning the Führer required hard demonic labor, then we can smile sarcastically along with Dieter as he listens to Himmler expound on Hitler’s superhuman Will and Vision and the rest of the pseudo- political, pseudo-philosophical notions dear to Nazi hearts. Superhuman Will and Vision? Dieter must think the mortals fools. Does Himmler have any idea how many demon-hours (evidently the infernal clocks are not set by eternity) were required to make all those dream etchings (and some of them went nowhere) in Hitler’s brain?

In that light, the coronation of Czar Nicholas II in Book VIII becomes a necessary detour away from rural Austria rather than a digression from Hitler’s biography. In St. Petersburg and at Khodynskoe, the Maestro’s agents are preparing the way for the Bolshevik Revolution and ultimately Stalin, and one need not indulge in alternative history to see how Hitler’s career depends on their success. The eastern assignment is evidently so important to the demonic designs that it boosts Dieter’s career: “I can vouch that the eight months I lived in Russia from late 1895 to the early summer of 1896 became a prominent element in my development as a high devil” (213). But—more diminution—as the reader well knows, Dieter’s Russian strategy also leads to the entry of the Red Army into Berlin and Hitler’s suicide and fiery end.

The diminution of Hitler does not depend solely on future events. In his capacity as biographer from hell, Dieter works against his subject from the beginning, cutting Hitler down to size even as he narrates his life story. Narcissistic and reflexively competitive, Dieter does not gladly share the spotlight with his young charge and his contempt is palpable. (We already know from ''Harlot’s Ghost'' that it is de rigueur for intelligence agents to despise the clients they cultivate). “I, too, am a protagonist” (''CIF'' 213), Dieter is quick to remind us. He presents his client as a boy devoid of any admirable qualities, except a talent for war games, the skill that damns him by bringing him to the attention of the Evil One. Otherwise Adi is an unappealing, fearful egotist enamored of power and brute force. Moreover, he suffers from that traditional affliction of the Evil One’s clients, a sulphurous smell. Every so often, Dieter reminds us that the little boy stinks; it is a gratuitous detail, mean and petty, but also funny. Adi is eventually shown to be completely loathsome in his jealousy (possibly murderous—Dieter hedges his bet here) towards his younger brother, the angelic Edmund whose death almost brings a smattering of human emotion to the demon. Compared with Adi, even Alois Senior and Junior, despite their crude appetites, cruelty, and violence, seem recognizably human.

If he demurs on the formative experiences in Adi’s life, Dieter is considerably less reluctant to disclose the requisite personality traits he nurtures in him. He begins by feeding the boy’s vanity, feeding it so well that every incident in his harsh, claustrophobic life is measured by an increase or decrease in his quantity of self-esteem. A stepbrother runs away from home, a brother dies, and Adi is chiefly concerned with his place in the family hierarchy, delighting when he becomes, first, the eldest son, then the only son. Through dreams, Dieter ensures that his young charge believes he has a special destiny, a belief completely contradicted by daytime evidence. The woozy nationalism of the late nineteenth century is seductive and, before long, the boy links his desperate and defiant sense of personal destiny to that of the ''Volk''. Following an adolescent outburst against both the prevailing prudery and his own sexual disgust, the young Hitler reads Treitschke in a school text and becomes mesmerized by a hyperbolic passage about the mystery and majesty of the German people. He barely understands the words but he is certain they are true. At this juncture, Dieter points menacingly toward the future: “We devils have known for a long time that a mediocre mind, once devoted to one mystical idea, can obtain a mental confidence well beyond its normal potential” (447). This is a contemptuous assessment from a biographer who thoroughly knows his subject—and a depressing thought, but true.

To complement his self-induced grandiosity, the young Hitler is schooled by Dieter in the fine art of data selection. When he receives failing grades at the Realschule, the boy convinces himself—with help from his handler—that his failure is actually a sign of intellectual superiority. In a compensatory fantasy, he envisions himself as a schoolteacher giving a lecture on the secret of true learning: “Do not try to remember all the facts of every historical event.... Most of the facts you have memorized are no better than debris which contradict other facts. So you will be in a state of confusion.... Select only those facts which clarify the issues” (419). This skill will obviously prove useful in Hitler’s later career. It is, incidentally, worth noting that here Mailer has slyly summarized a basic tool of bad governance, popular with a great many leaders besides Hitler. (One would very much like to know where D.T., the American incarnation of the narrating devil who was once Dieter, would have directed his attention on this side of the Atlantic. But those episodes belong to a subsequent volume that Mailer did not live to write.)

By the time of the ''Realschule'' failures, Dieter has already used Adi’s twin obsessions with primogeniture and patriarchy to prepare him for the apotheosis of data selection—a lifetime of mendacity. (Curiously enough, although he was once reviled by feminists, in ''The Castle in the Forest'' Mailer offers a stunningly cold dissection of patriarchy and its discontents.) When Alois Senior savagely attacks his eldest son, Dieter deploys his infernal machinations to make the terrified little Adi believe that he himself was the victim, and Hitler spends the rest of his life believing that his father almost beat him to death. Through the false memory, Dieter lays the groundwork for an entire edifice of lies: “this fiction would enable me to develop Adi’s future incapacity to tell the truth. By the time his political career began, he was in command of an artwork of lies elaborate enough to support his smallest need. He could shave the truth by a hair or subvert it altogether” (316). If it were any man but Hitler, the pathos of a bogus Oedipal struggle (a hated stepbrother acting as surrogate to confront the vengeful father where three roads meet) would merit pity.

Or, there would be pity, if the narrator were someone other than Dieter. Although he is an immensely entertaining story-teller, he ''is'' a devil, cut off from the full range of human experience, his emotional vocabulary accurate only when expressing combative, competitive egotism. It is useful here to remember how one of Dieter’s literary ancestors, Milton’s Satan, becomes so distracted by Eve’s beauty that for a moment he loses his hate and envy and stands there, abstracted from his usual evil, “Stupidly good” (''Paradise Lost'' 9. 465). Dumb passivity is as close as Satan gets to understanding Eden and prelapsarian experience; the local animals and even the plants have richer emotional lives than he does. For his part, Dieter is well-acquainted with envy, self-pity, ambition, lust, physical pain and pleasure. But compassion, longing, sorrow, remorse and love are unfamiliar to him, except in a reductive sense: “we do look for the lowest common denominator to any truth” (Mailer, Castle 99).

Dieter’s truncated psyche gets him (that is, his S.S. officer incarnation) killed in the Waldschloss. As he tells it, the Jewish psychiatrist who interrogates him is upset by the pestilential effluvia and the shouts of the liberated prisoners and seeks out Dieter’s company because they are both high-ranking officers. Dieter must have engaged in some extremely obtuse data selection because he has egregiously misjudged the situation. The American has just encountered immeasurably greater horrors than a few bad smells and as a Jew is probably taking the horrors personally. But empathy is so alien to Dieter that he makes the fatal mistake of pretending to be conscience-stricken. (An argument could be made that Dieter is clueless here because he has been wearing the S.S. uniform for so long that even the vestigial sensibilities of a demon have atrophied.) The sense that Dieter gets what he deserves is inescapable.

At that moment, we are abruptly reminded that Dieter is not an impartial narrator nor a reliable one, and we have been of (and at) the devil’s party, amusing ourselves as we watch the heartless education of a wretched little boy in the arts of lying and self-deception. In 1940, in ''The Great Dictator'', Charlie Chaplin imagined Hitler subsumed by a double, an anonymous Jewish barber. What Chaplin began before Hitler was fully yet the murderer he would become, Mailer completes after the fact. Hitler is subsumed by his biographer, the slick Dieter, good at schmoozing and imprinting his own image on his clients. Significantly, Dieter appropriates the soul of the young Hitler without temptation, without the flattery and bogus promises of wealth, power, knowledge, or beautiful women that are the stock-in-trade ploy of the devil. It is possible a temptation scene might have figured in a later episode in a subsequent volume, but that is idle speculation. In the novel as we have it, Dieter so overshadows his client that he effectively blots him out.

As we know from Aristotle, history merely tells us what happened, poetry what might have happened. There is reason to believe (or hope) that if what might have happened is well told enough, the way we perceive what happened changes. Isn’t Napoleon’s invasion of Russia forever defined by Tolstoy and World War I by Hemingway? Then there is a chance—the odds unknown—that some years hence, the popular view of Hitler will be shaped by Mailer’s novel. Hitler, the man of millennial urges who dominated the twentieth-century, reduced to a powerless stick figure—that would be exemplary ''contrapasso'', retributive justice meted out by literature, as though ''The Castle'' were a ''roman à clef'', albeit one written to redress historical rather than private grievances.

Meanwhile, for the present, does the novel-cum-''Purim-shpil'' change anything? If Mailer was correct in his letter to Jack Henry Abbot and my existence was stunted by Hitler, am I less stunted for having read ''Castle in the Forest''?

I resort to another autobiographical vignette.

Some months after my husband gave me ''Castle'' as a Purim gift, we were in a bookstore again, but not, as before, in a strip mall in Pittsburgh. This time we were in a shop near the chic Kärtnerstrasse, close to the street where I was born in Vienna. I had recently had a landmark birthday and it was my husband’s idea that we celebrate it there. After a lifetime of ambivalence about my natal city, I had hesitated. But since he had never really seen Vienna and it has the reputation of being one of the most livable cities in the world, I agreed to go.

On a table, among the new selections, was a stack of books entitled ''Das Schloss im Wald''. I picked up one of the books, thumbed through it, handed it to my husband. We exchanged sly glances. For my purposes, the timing of the German translation of ''The Castle in the Forest'' couldn’t have been more fortuitous.

A clerk was watching us. He had that wonderfully welcoming face that so many young Austrians have but I thought his expression implied more—a chance, perhaps, to discuss the new book with a couple of Americans.

The possibility of a literary chat was intriguing. Austria was late in addressing its Nazi past, but when it finally did, it undertook the work with commendable seriousness. I had just been to see the inverted blank concrete books of the Holocaust memorial on Judenplatz. It was, I thought, a solemn act of piety.

''“Nein, danke,”'' I shook my head and smiled at the young clerk. I didn’t need any help.

And I didn’t. I could forgo the chat. On the table in front of me I had everything I wanted. The desire for retribution is atavistic, unattractive, and yet undeniable. For the Austrians, concrete books, unwritten and unreadable, made a fit monument. But ''Das Schloss im Wald'', Mailer’s self-razing biography of Hitler, was fit for me.

Yes, Vienna was one of the most livable cities, as well as one of the prettiest. For the first time, I allowed myself to feel the familiar comfort of a childhood home and it was sweet, like ''hamantaschen''.

''I wish to thank Elemer Boreczky, Gloria Erlich, and Carol Holmes for their comments on this essay.''

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite journal |last=Anshen |first=David |title=The New Politics of Form in ''Harlot’s Ghost''|url= |journal= |volume=2 |issue=1 |date=2008 |pages=452-73 |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Armour |first=Peter |date=2000 |title=Dante’s Contrapasso: Contexts and Texts. |url= |location= |publisher= Italian Studies 55|pages=1-20 |ref=harv }}

Aronowicz, Annette. “''Homens Mapole'': Hope in the Immediate Postwar Period.” ''Jewish Quarterly
Review'' 98. 3 (2008): 355–88. ''Project Muse''. Web. 22 June 2010.

Bernstein, Mashey. “In a Different Way, Norman Mailer Was a Deeply Jewish Writer.” ''Deep South Jewish Voice'' 18. 1 (Dec. 2007): 100–101. ''ProQuest''. Web. 3 Mar. 2009.

Cappell, Ezra. “Norman Mailer: A Man of Letters Inspired by the People of the Book.” ''Forward''. 16
Nov. 2007: A1. ''ProQuest''. Web. 3 Mar. 2009.

Coetzee, J. M. "Portrait of the Monster as a Young Artist." ''New York Review of Books'' 54. 2 (15 Feb.
2007): 8–11. Print.

Dante Alighieri. ''Inferno''. Trans. Robert and Jean Hollander. New York: Doubleday, 2000. Print.

Fleming, James R. "‘But Where is the Castle?’: The Function of Modernist Allegory in Norman
Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest''." ''EAPSU Online'' 5 (Fall, 2008): 143–55. Web. 11 July 2010.

Gross, John."Young Adolf." Rev. of ''The Castle in the Forest''. ''Commentary'' 123. 3 (2007): 59+. ''Expanded
Academic ASAP''. Web. 23 Apr. 2010.

Hartman, Geoffrey. “Milton’s Counterplot.“ ''ELH'' 28. 1 (1958): 1–12. Print.

Hollander,Robertet.al. ''PrincetonDanteProject''.Web. 25 Feb. 2010. <http://etcweb.princeton.edu/dante/pdp/>.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. “Contraband: Performance, Text and Analysis of a ''Purim-shpil''.” ''Drama Review'' 24. 3 (1980): 5–16. ''JSTOR''. Web. 17 Jan. 2009.

Lukacs, John. ''The Legacy of the Second World War''. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Print.

Mailer, Norman. ''Advertisements for Myself''. New York. Putnam. 1959. Print.

____. ''The Castle in the Forest''. New York: Random House, 2007. Print

____. ''Harlot’s Ghost''. New York: Random House, 1991. Print.

____. Interview by Michael Lennon. ''Bookreporter.com''. 23 Feb. 2007. Web. 3 Mar. 2009. <http://
www.bookreporter.com/authors/au-mailer-norman.asp>.

____. “Norman Mailer: Letters to Jack Abbott.” ''New York Review of Books'' 56. 4 (12 March 1009): n. pag. Web. 7 Aug. 2010.

Milton, John. ''Paradise Lost. Complete Poems and Major Prose.'' Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York:
Odyssey Press, 1957. 173–469. Print.

''“Purim-Shpil.” Encyclopaedia Judaica''. 2nd ed. 2007. Print.

Ricks, Christopher. “The Devil Only Knows.” ''The Mailer Review'' 1. 1 (2007): 206–214. Print.

Siegel, Lee. “Maestro of the Human Ego.“ Rev. of ''The Castle in the Forest'', by Norman Mailer. ''New
York Times''. New York Times. 21 Jan. 2007. Web. 22 Apr. 2010.

Solomon, Barbara Probst. “Mailer’s Choice.” ''The Mailer Review'' 1. 1 (2007): 223–28. Print.

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in The Castle in the Forest

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Maggiemrogers:

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in The Castle in the Forest

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Maggiemrogers: I added the byline with Author and Abstract info and started on the body of the text.

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in The Castle in the Forest

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Maggiemrogers:

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in The Castle in the Forest

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Maggiemrogers:

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{{Byline|last=Peczenik|first=Fannie}}

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Maggiemrogers: /* Bio */

== Bio ==
My name is Maggie Rogers, and I'm enrolled in the Master of Arts in Technical and Professional Writing at Middle Georgia State University. I work in higher education as an academic advisor, and I'm passionate about supporting student success.

[[Category:Student Editors]] [[Category:Spring 2025]]

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Maggiemrogers: Created page with "== Bio == My name is Maggie Rogers, and I'm enrolled in the Master of Arts in Technical and Professional Writing at Middle Georgia State University. I work in higher education as an academic advisor, and I'm passionate about supporting student success."